Sometimes the hardest thing about making art is coming up with an idea. I tend to struggle with that when my mental health is bad or I am stressed about something. It becomes more difficult when you know art will be helpful, but you don’t know what to paint. Abstract can be an option. Or you can look for a prompt. Prompts are also beneficial when you want to push yourself out of your comfort zone and come up with new ideas. With holiday stress approaching, let’s leave some decisions up to chance and make some art.
Welcome to my LAST blogpost! It really seems like the past three months have flown by. I go by Artsy Bat Brooke on all my art social medias and you can find me on Instagram at @artsy.bat.brooke and on YouTube at ArtsyBatBrooke. I have been doing art for most of my life, though I did take some breaks during college and a few times when life was too stressful. My primary medium is watercolors and I use them for the majority of my mental health paintings and creating characters. I am working towards writing and illustrating a children’s picture book and possibly comics.
For this activity, you will need painting supplies as well as dice or a dice roller on your phone. The first step is to pick your palette. The reason for choosing palette first is so when the prompts are chosen, you will not be tempted to grab a comfortable color palette and try a combination you might not normally use. You can do this by assigning numbers to colors and rolling the dice a couple times to pick colors, or you can use a premade palette. I have twelve SmilingHippo palettes (I’ve been collecting them for a while) and I used a twelve-sided dice to choose one. If you have more than 6 and have only a six-sided dice there is a way to choose using the dice:
1. divide them into two groups designating one as even and the other as odd
2. Roll the die
3. If even, put away the odd group and vice versa
4. Roll again to choose the palette.
Once you have your color palette, then it is time to get the prompt. You will be rolling to figure out what type of subject matter you will be painting. Below is the chart you can follow. When I rolled, I got a 2 so I will be doing a landscape.
Next is to refine it a little to get a more specific subject matter. Again, Charts below. I was using a brand-new dice and it gave me two again; after rolling more, it does seem like it favors two when rolled gently, but I will still go with it. That means I will be painting a desert. If you roll 6 for Fantasy Creature, go to the animal chart, roll your dice twice and combine the two animals you get.
If you are still struggling to come up with an idea, search your results on the internet and there will be many reference pictures to choose from. Remember, references are not cheating, they are learning tools.
So, for my improbable desert roll, I had two thoughts: Georgia O’Keeffe later in life paintings or Snoopy’s brotherSpike from Peanuts that lives in the desert. I decided to go with the cartoon style and this was my result.
I hope you have fun with this activity and if you do it, tag me in the results to that I can see your creations. Happy Creating!