I’m sharing a peek at a quick video (below) of a warm-up mark-making session I filmed recently. This little painting was made in about 10 or 15 minutes, in oil on an 8×10” Artefex AllinPanel 537, which is oil primed linen on ACM panel. I’ve been making some videos for Artefex as their featured artist this month and there are more videos posted on my/their Instagram page for that.

This shows a typical sort of start and/or warm-up exercise I do regularly. Typical in the sense that I use this time to loosen up, explore, try new things. In this case, I have been trying different surfaces that Artefex offers. This panel has a bit of a canvas weave texture, which you can see in the image and video, while it also has a nice limited amount of absorbency and smoothness for pick-out.

The tools I used are shown here, in the order they appear in the video:

These tools are what I tend to use in the initial stage of painting when I’m making abstract marks that I will be building the rest of the painting on top of. The sizes of these tools may vary depending on the size of painting, but their purpose is relatively similar throughout this stage. I usually start with abstract that feel similar to this quick painting and then I develop forms, possibly figures and/or faces. I intend to build onto this painting, and will show the next phase of the work I add to it in a future post here on Muddy Colors. I rarely post videos here but hope to share more of that in the future too. See video below. Hope you enjoy seeing a peek at the beginning of my process and how I use these tools!

If you like this, you might also like my process video “Flow” here on Muddy Colors, which shows a painting from start to finish and includes a nice discussion with Dan Dos Santos about the process, art in general, and life. You can find that here. As well as many of my other process articles on Muddy Colors here.

Thanks for checking it out!