Fresh Paint

Discover Your Unique Creative Style Through 100 Small Mixed-Media Paintings

Flora Bowley, Lynzee Lynx

• Publisher: Quarry Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780760370698
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Discover and deepen your creative style through the process of creating 100 small mixed-media paintings. In Fresh Paint, creative influencer, workshop leader, and author of Brave Intuitive Painting and Creative Revolution, Flora Bowley, and her collaborator and fellow artist, Lynzee Lynx, offer transformational, accessible, and lasting ways to infuse more meaning and authenticity into your artwork. For years, Flora and Lynzee have witnessed their students struggling to find their own voices. The desire is there, but coming up with innovative and unique ways to express yourself can feel daunting. In response to this persistent challenge and fueled by their passion for authenticity, they spent years cultivating and distilling a potent curriculum to support creative seekers looking for more integrity, depth, and originality in their work. Their online course Fresh Paint was the result, and now with this book, you too can explore how finding your creative voice translates into a more courageous, inspired, empowered, nourishing, and world-changing way of living and making art. Fresh Paint uses mixed-media art projects along with prompts for movement, meditation, and writing to explore personal experience, individual preference, ancestry, intuition, and body wisdom. Through the process of creating 100 small mixed-media paintings based on these inquiries, your style will reveal itself to you, and your artmaking will be more satisfying and fun. If you're ready to infuse more meaning, personal story, and satisfaction into your work, while truly setting yourself apart from the rest and avoiding the common pitfall of making work that looks and feels derivative of other artists', this book is for you. Welcome to Fresh Paint, an inspiring adventure all about discovering and developing a unique creative style!

1

OUR PHILOSOPHY

AS YOU TAKE THE FIRST STEPS on your style-finding adventure, we want to begin by sharing a few big-picture concepts that will help lay the foundation for your journey ahead.

While the invitations within these pages are certainly not presented as a step-by-step manual, understanding how you will be spending your time and how you can most effectively move through the material is always helpful!

We can’t wait to get started . . .

EIGHT INGREDIENTS FOR FINDING YOUR STYLE

We believe there are eight key ingredients needed in order to discover and develop a personal creative style. These ingredients are: Desire, Self-Inquiry, Trust, Awareness, Expansion, Exploration, Gentleness, and Dedication. Below, we’ve expanded upon why each of these ingredients is so vital to this process.

1. Desire

Having a clear desire to explore or make a change is often the first step on any journey. This kind of sincere motivation serves as potent fuel for the quest, and it also helps you stay the course. We imagine if you’re reading this book, you already have the desire to find your unique style, so you’re off to a great start!

2. Self-Inquiry

If you want to invite more of you into your creative process, your life experiences, cultural lineage, relationships, passions, and memories create a fertile ground where your personal style has already been developing and growing throughout your entire life.

3. Trust

Fostering the courage to listen to your intuition is a foundational practice when it comes to seeking your own artistic style. From there, learning to trust what you see, hear, and feel in order to bring this information to life in new and meaningful ways is the next step.

4. Awareness

Moving through your day-to-day life with a keen awareness of what draws you in and lights you up not only makes the world around you feel more alive, but it also connects you to the present moment and to your creative spirit each and every day.

5. Expansion

Continually evolving and growing in different ways, learning from new teachers, pushing your boundaries, and exploring techniques and materials that are unfamiliar create more opportunities for something truly unique to emerge in your art-making practice.

6. Exploration

Giving yourself the time and space to explore and try things on in a way that is curiosity-driven, not outcome-driven, is critical when it comes to developing a unique artistic style. We believe creating one hundred paintings and considering them “studies” is a great way to set yourself up for a world of exploration and success.

7. Gentleness

If you’ve engaged in the creative process, you’ve probably gotten to know your inner critic. Whether it’s loud and obnoxious or soft and persistent, negative self-talk often gets in the way of freedom, and sometimes it even makes you want to quit. This is why cultivating a gentle and compassionate inner voice helps you stay present, even in the tough moments.

8. Dedication

Although it’s easy to want to speed right to the finish line, discovering and developing a unique artistic style is a life-long journey that requires dedication and persistence. You get to do this work!

THREE AREAS OF PRACTICE

With the Eight Ingredients serving as the foundation for our style-finding adventures, let’s explore the three main areas of practice that each ingredient falls into. You can think of these as the three ways you will spend your time as you develop your artistic style: Internal Exploration, External Exploration, and Hands-On Art-Making Practice.

There are many ways to engage in each practice, and we wholeheartedly encourage you to branch out and add to our repertoire of explorations as inspiration strikes. In other words, do YOU. That’s what this book is all about!

Here are some examples of different ways you might explore each area of practice:

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Before we break out the paints, we want to share some helpful tips and guidelines about how to move through this process and get the most from this book.

We understand many art books and courses offer a clear, start-to-finish ...