Jumpstart Jam Jar List - by Skylark

Have you ever needed a quick break to paint something fun and fast? Perhaps you are working on a larger painting and need a break, or you are thinking of working on a painting, or you are just plain procrastinating. Since I am guilty of thinking more about painting than actually picking up the brush, I would like to share some techniques that have worked for me. Today I will talk about the Jumpstart Jam Jar List. 

The basic idea is to create a virtual “Jam Jar” full of suggestions to jumpstart your work. Each idea should be fun with just enough structure to complete the project fairly painlessly.
 

I approached Danielle about asking you guys to contribute fun ideas for the collective Jam Jar. The goal is to get 30 suggestions, enough for a new idea every day for one month.
 

Here are a few ideas from me to start you off. Danielle has jumped in and contributed a few suggestions as well!  

• From me (Skylark): This is an idea that one of my early teachers assigned to participants. Her instructions were to first wet a sheet of paper and then drop in, wet on wet, colors of our choice, watching the colors spread and flow. Do not use a hair dryer to stop the process. Let the page dry completely. Then after the sheet has dried, create a design on it using only straight and curved lines, letting one kind dominate. You will be surprised what you come up with!  Here is an example entitled "The Hurried Kitchen" and illustrates the technique of wet on wet and then straight and curved lines".   This was done really fast and illustrates my kitchen in the mornings before work.   Everything is rushed and swirling round and round.  You can see a banana, perhaps a hot stove, and a fish --- your imagination can take over!

• (Skylark): Do a fractured painting. Take a simple composition, say a vase. Now draw curved lines and break it up into segments. Then fill each little segment with lovely, pure jewel colors. Later, I have found that Dory Kanter, author of the lovely book “Art Escapes” has demonstrated something similar on YouTube that she calls “prismatic painting.   Here is an example I created a while ago. Can you spot the camel and the vase?

• (Skylark): A third idea from me is to create a variation of a stained glass painting. This was inspired by one of Picasso’s paintings. Divide up the page into segments by drawing intersecting flowing lines. Then in each segment draw part of an object. Say part of a violin peeks out in one segment. In another segment there could be part of the music sheet. It could all relate to one theme, or be several items jumbled together. Make sure you paint each segment fully. Then go back and darken the flowing dividing lines, with a darker color. If your segments are all dark, you can use a lighter color for contrast.  
• (Skylark): The fourth idea is a home-made variation inspired by Betsy Dillard Stroud’s creative book “The Artist’s Muse: Unlock the Door to Your Creativity”. Get a stack of 2 different colored index cards, say white and yellow. On each white card, write a noun. Avoid proper nouns. So say, you have made 20 cards with “book”, “cake”, “bridge” and so on. Then on each yellow card, write an emotion. Then choose one card from each pile and paint what it says even though it might sound ridiculous! Draw a “frustrated cake” or “wise dog”. Have a laugh! Or you can have a third set of cards with a color on each. Now you can draw a “red wise dog”. Of course you can have cards with your own rules that might suit your personality more. But you must draw the combination you pick! .
• (Skylark): The fifth and last idea from me is to cut up watercolor paper into trading card sizes or a bit larger. Then on each card, make an abstract design based on a particular color scheme. Nita Leland’s book “Confident Color” is wonderful as are many other books by great artists. You can explore many different kinds of complementary, split complementary, triads, tetrads and so on. You will have fun and build up an awesome personal reference of color which will be practical and handy in the future.

Now here are Danielle’s ideas.

There is no need to look very far for ideas. Paint something next to you such as your bushes or tubes of paint;

• Force yourself to paint a small (4” X 6”) sketch in 10-15 minutes using one colour every day for a week.
• Paint three fruits from three different angles.

And now it is you -- the reader – who is invited to contribute! Please post your ideas below in comment section. As you give us ideas, the list will expand. If even 10 of us contribute 3 ideas each, that will give us a month of fun! If the response is good, Danielle may even keep the “Jumpstart Jam Jar” on a separate page for you to refer to! 

Skylark

Thanks Dragongirl for providing us with a visual of a frustrated cake.

Skylark is offering the following two additional ideas - February 1, 2015

• Another technique consists of taking an object or simple painting and reducing it to an overall flat design.    The third picture illustrates this with a painting of a bottle and egg.  I show the original black and white painting and then the design.    

• I believe you will really have fun with this.   Last night, I stumbled on a 6 minute video on youtube showing a postcard sized painting of a starry sky (link below).   That is when I realized that you can make really fun and lovely paintings by exploring the Astronomy Picture of the Day at apod.nasa.gov.   Once you go there and see the archives, apart from the wondrous pictures of our galaxy, the youtube video made me realize I could have a lot of fun painting from them, not exact copies, but just using those as inspiration.  Because there is a snow storm today, I took about 10 minutes and painted this.   It is not a "real" painting but think of this as something to do for fun!   My inspiration was the APOD for Jan 31st 2015 and it is called "Yellow Balls in W33".   Have fun.  Be imperfect and post your little pieces of the galaxy here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ebVULQPc-s
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html    gives you today's picture.  You can go to the index and look at the archives.  Gorgeous!

From Ptolomy on February 2, 2015:  I bought a ipad a few years ago, it's a great way to carry a  lot of photos  around in compact form. I am married to a photographer and have many photographer friends who have  given me permission to use their photos for my art. What I do is I spend a few minutes a day checking out their latest photos and archived photos on Facebook and Flickr. I save them to my iPad for future use. 

Every morning and whenever I can snatch a few minutes I will sketch something, usually from these photos. It doesn’t matter what I use, ink, charcoal, graphite, watercolours  etc..it's just a sketch and it can be as loose or as detailed as I please. Sometimes I will sketch the same photo several times in different media. Each type has its own merits and helps me see the photo and the composition. These photos I usually upload to the sketching thread and they are  my second reference for my finished paintings.

When I feel at a loss for something to paint...as a proper painting, not a sketch, I revisit some of my old sketches  and think, I should do this in pastel, or I should do this in watercolour or CPs...or I wonder if I can combine them?  And sometimes I have even completed a proper painting of the same thing in two different media, just because.

I guess for me, a finished piece is the end product of a long process. I don't feel a need to sit and create a masterpiece all the time, in fact for me it's rare that I  feel a need to do that. I know that most of my sketches will probably never develop beyond the sketch phase, but if the need is there, they always have potential to be something more.

 I really believe strongly that doing something every day makes us better at it. Nothing is too small. Even lining up a few objects and sketching them is good, I tend to sketch things at restaurants while waiting for our food. You train the hand, you train the eye and you train yourself to see more. 

Note: if there is sufficient comments and ideas posted, a separate page could be created for ease of reference

Here is Danielle's art find of the week. This artist is Fernando Artal Martinez and you can find much of his work on FaceBook.