Come Play with Me! 😊 🌈✨

Join my playful little mixed-media adventure in colour, shape & mark-making 😊 

A little confession.

I’ve spent eighteen years teaching people to paint faces & animals, and abstract art still used to properly intimidate me. Give me a face and I’m away. Give me a blank page with nothing to hold onto and I’d freeze.

What I eventually found is that there are principles sitting underneath the play, and once you know them, the playing gets braver and far more fun. Now it’s where I go when I’m tired of getting the nose in the right place. 😂 👃🏻

That’s what I want to hand you here. 🌈

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This offer runs until August 30th!

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Testimonial: 

The Abstract Playground is a short, joyful mixed-media class all about loosening up, experimenting with colour and creating vibrant abstract art through layers, shapes, marks and playful details. If you’ve ever looked at abstract art and thought: “But… how do I know what to put where?” or “How do I make something loose and spontaneous without it turning into complete chaos?” 😆 — this class is for you!

I’ll take you through my own playful abstract process step by step, showing you how I build paintings from simple shapes and translucent washes into rich, layered pieces full of contrast, movement, texture and personality.

There is no need to draw anything realistically.

No faces. No figures. No worrying about whether the nose is in the right place. 😉

We’re going to play.

• With colour.
• With circles.
• With splatters.
• With lines, dots, symbols, scribbles and delicious little marks.
• With layers that overlap, interact and sometimes surprise us.

The aim isn’t perfection.

The aim is to explore, respond, experiment and discover what happens when you give yourself permission to follow colour and curiosity.

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What You’ll Explore

Inside the class, I’ll show you how I approach abstract art using some simple principles that help a piece feel playful and spontaneous while still holding together visually.

We’ll explore:

Colour

• How I choose and work with warm and cool colour palettes
• Simple colour theory and analogous + complementary colour schemes
• How complementary colours can make a painting POP

Layers & Media

• How to layer translucent and opaque media
• Working from lighter values towards darker ones
• Creating contrast through light and dark, large and small, quiet and busy

Marks & Composition

• Creating variety through different kinds of mark-making
• Using circles, lines, dots, symbols and organic shapes
• Wet-in-wet effects with watercolour
• Scratching and etching into wet paint
• Adding splatter and spontaneous marks
• Ways to keep an abstract composition interesting without overthinking every decision
• Building compositions from simple recurring shapes

Most importantly, I want to help you become more comfortable with playing and responding to what is happening on the page, rather than needing to know exactly where the painting is going before you begin.

What happy students have said about my teaching: 

We’ll create both warm and cool abstracts.

We’ll explore two different colour worlds.

🔥 The Warm Playground

Think glorious oranges, yellows, pinks, magentas and reds, layered together with little pops of turquoise and teal.

We’ll build up translucent washes, overlapping organic shapes, luscious darker areas and all sorts of tiny playful marks until the painting becomes a riot of colour and movement.

❄️ The Cool Playground

Then we’ll move into turquoise, teal, blues, greens, indigos, ochres and browns.

The mood changes completely, but we’ll use many of the same principles: layering, contrast, repetition, variety and complementary accents.

Seeing the process through two very different colour palettes is a wonderful way to understand how the same abstract principles can produce completely different results.

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CLASS 1 — GETTING STARTED + THE WARM LESSON

• Introduction We’ll have a little chat about the class, abstract play and the approach we’ll be taking.
• Colour Theory – I’ll introduce the simple colour ideas I use in these paintings — particularly analogous colour palettes and complementary accents — without turning it into a terrifying university lecture on colour wheels. 😜
• Part 1 – Warm Abstract — We’ll begin our warm painting and start building our composition with colour, simple shapes, overlapping washes, etching, splatter and early layers.
• Part 2 – Warm Abstract — We’ll continue building depth and contrast, introducing darker values, acrylic inks, marks, details and those final complementary accents that bring everything together.

CLASS 2 — THE COOL LESSONS

• Part 1 – Cool Abstract — We’ll begin again with a completely different colour atmosphere, using beautiful cool blues, turquoises, teals and greens alongside earthy neutral tones.We’ll develop the painting through more layers, contrast, marks and details until our cool abstract piece feels rich, balanced and complete.
• Part 2 – Cool Abstract GRID — In this lesson, we’ll take the same principles and techniques and use them to create a playful abstract grid. We’ll divide the page into smaller spaces and make a series of mini abstract compositions, experimenting with colour, shape, layering, contrast and mark-making in each one. It’s a brilliant way to explore lots of compositional possibilities on one page, while repeated colours and marks help everything feel beautifully connected. 💙✨

CLASS 3 — BONUS PLAY

Once you’ve seen the full process in detail, you can watch me explore it again in short, additional timelapse process videos.

These include explorations of:

• Bonus Warm Abstract
• Bonus Cool Abstract
• Bonus Warm Abstract Grid
• Bonus Warm/ Cool Mix

These bonus videos are wonderful for seeing how the ideas from the main lessons can be changed, repeated and adapted rather than becoming a fixed “recipe”.

Because that’s the whole point of the playground: same principles, endless possibilities.

The Art Supplies

Please note: you don’t need exactly all the art supplies I use, you can substitute/ replace some with others you already have. 

I use a mixture of gorgeous mixed-media supplies in this class, including:

• Watercolour paints
• Watercolour paper or a watercolour sketchbook
• Acrylic inks (I use Liquitex and Daler Rowney)
• Acrylic paint markers such as Posca pens
• Fine permanent markers such as Sharpies
• Neocolor II or similar water-soluble crayons
• Brushes
• A bamboo skewer or another tool for etching into wet paint
• Washi or masking tape

And please don’t worry if you don’t own the exact brands or colours I use.

Substitute, improvise and use what you have.

This is a playground, after all. 😁

This class might be for you if …

• You’d love to make abstract art but don’t quite know how to begin.
• You want to become looser and more playful in your art-making.
• You love colour, pattern, marks and mixed media.
• You sometimes get stuck worrying about whether your artwork is “right”.
• You’d like some structure and guidance without being told exactly what every mark must look like.
• You want a small, satisfying class rather than embarking on another twelve-year creative odyssey. 😂 This class is approximately 4 hours in total. 

Or perhaps you’ve been painting for years and simply want an excuse to get your supplies out, turn your thinking brain down a few notches and spend some delicious time playing with colour.

You are very welcome here. ❤️

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There is no single “right” abstract painting.

One of the things I love most about this way of working is that your piece shouldn’t look exactly like mine.

• I’ll give you principles to work with.
• I’ll show you the decisions I’m making and why.
• I’ll demonstrate ways of creating contrast and interest.
• But then you get to take those ideas and make your own choices.
• Your circles might become leaves.
• Your dots might become dashes.
• Your palette might wander somewhere completely unexpected.
• One mark suggests another.
• One colour changes what the painting needs next.

And gradually something wonderfully, unmistakably yours begins to appear.

That is the magic I want us to explore together.

Further Information

COME PLAY WITH ME 🌈

Give yourself permission:

• To splash paint.
• To scratch through wet colour.
• To make a weird shape simply because you like the weird shape.
• To add the dot.
• And then another dot.
• And possibly seventeen more dots because apparently we live here now. 😆

Come explore colour, contrast, layers and marks with me in The Abstract Playground.

I can’t wait to see what you create!

Join Now and Save Over 25%!
This offer runs until August 30th!

See you there! ♥️♥️♥️