Let's expand the idea of a line to stripes. Many known artists have used stripes, including Maurice Lewis gearheart, Richter, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Nolan, these are very well known hard edged abstractionists, but it also works in other schools as well. So let's start with the idea of stripes. Here is a simple painting using stripes. Now, every stripe is maybe a different color, but within each stripe, they're pretty uniform. So, again, we have to look at this and say, Is this enough to transform into something else?

Or does it look like just painted stripes? My idea of a painting is to create an experience of space, some kind of inviting place where a viewers eyes are going to be invited in to maybe an altered experience or some kind of an unusual experience some kind of deeper experience. So, with abstract expressionists, they were using a lot of hard edge lines and stripes. And so the color that they choose was very important. And also, subtle variation was important. And this kind of very blatant, evenly applied stripes might actually feel like wallpaper and might not be enough to invite someone in feeling like it's a sense of space.

Let's compare this to another painting by a friend of mine named Willie Bo Richardson. As we compare these two, think about how your eyes feel when you look at them. Look at this one versus looking at this one. Which one makes you feel like you're being invited in it has a feeling of space and look at all the variety that Richardson created in this piece. Every color, every stripe has a different color. The edges between the stripes Some are hard, some are soft, there's over Clap the stripe overlaps these.

This is varied next to something that's pretty uniform. So I wanted to demonstrate how we can take the simple idea of stripes and vary them. So let's start with the idea that I'm not going to use color straight out of the tube. Color straight out of the tube tends to look brass or not very inviting. I think it makes a difference when you just take colors and start playing with them and mixing them. So I am going to mix a few colors together.

Instead of thinking about a family of colors, like we did with the red and the blue. I'm going to just make a grouping of interesting colors. So they don't have to relate to each other. But they just have to be something that interests you. So I'm just going to play around with color and I'm going to mix a few and I'll just stop when it feels interesting. So that color, I like that color.

Now I'm going to try a lighter one. Oops, don't do what I just did. It's good to really wipe off your palette knife and dip it in water and the paper towel where you end up contaminating your colors like that. But I can always take it off and add more color later. There's a light yellow, but it looks kind of boring. Still look straight up the tube even though I added just a little bit of wipe.

So put a little green. And by the way I didn't mention earlier when I first introduced this idea of an enhanced full palette didn't mention that. I took the time to take a little bit of white and put it next to each of these colors. So I don't know if you can see it now that I've kind of messed up the palette but let's look at These four yellows here, you can see that here is the paint that I squeezed out. But next to it, I took a little bit of white. I'll do it right now, I took a little bit of white, and I put it next to the color next to this.

And I took some of the actual paint and mixed it in to see how it tends with white, because each of these colors tends differently. And remember I mentioned that there were mineral and modern colors, the mineral colors, if you look at them, this tint is pretty similar to the color doesn't change that much, it just gets a little bit lighter and a little chunkier. Whereas these two modern colors, almost pop like a light comes on when you add a little bit of weight. And if I didn't add these little bit of visual indicators on each color, with a little bit of white, I call it a little tail tend to tail. If I didn't do that, the palate would be a little confused. Because all if you just look at these three colors here without this little tail here, they all look dark.

And this gives me a visual indication of what the true color can be. So just wanted to mention that and so I've got two colors here and I'll do something blue. Well, since this is already contaminated, I'll show you my bad habits. This is the good habit. I'll add a little dark. By the way, this enhanced palette I talked about the light values but the dark values I didn't mention.

This is black right out of the tube. I did tell you it was carbon black, but then I like to have if you look without these two colors here. There's a big jump between this green here in the black, just like there was a big jump between the white and yellow, I like to add my own mixtures of darks. So I made a mixture of brown and a mixture of black. And here are the colors, showing me what I use to mix with them. So I use the Yellow Blue quinacridone magenta and a hands the yellow medium here.

And it is fun when you make complicated complex mixtures to actually put little indicators of what you use to make them in case you want to make it again. And then I put a white 10th tail I call it right here to show me what it looks like when it's tinted. Here I'm using also a red blue and a yellow. But the more yellow and warm red that you use, the more it turns to brown. So they both have red, blue and yellow. But this one's more of a blue black and this one's more of a brown, again, depending on the quantities of the warm yellow and red versus the cool blue that you put in there.

And it's nice having that instead of always having the carbon black to go If you want black, so I think I'll use that as one of my colors and maybe add a little white to it. Make it more of a gray. It looks too similar to that and I'm trying to make colors look different from each other. So I think I'll add more red, more purple here. I know I mentioned before that it's easy to want to just do something very quickly and not take the time to mix but this is actually fun. I enjoy mixing colors.

It's such a nice part of painting. And it's sort of meditative gives you time to think about what you're going to paint. I'm just going to mix one more. I think I'll use this orange and see what I mean by brass look at it in conjunction with the rest of the colors. That are pre mixed that are custom mixed, I should say. Sometimes right from the tube, they just look like they stand out a little too much.

So I'm gonna tone it down a little with some white. At some of this nice brown I made add a little more yellow in here. Okay. This is enough variety for me just to start, and then while I'm painting, I can mix and match them together. The first stripe that I'm going to do is a hard edged stripe. And that's because we were looking at hard edged abstractionists reminded me of how fun it is to tape.

So the first thing I'm going to do is put some tape down and you should always leave a little bit of tape sticking out so you can pull it off later. Okay, and I'll leave this bear so that I can bury it. Okay, I'm going to take one color and make a ferried stripe just like I did the red stripe. I'm going to keep changing color. I don't want that color. This one.

Notice even though I mix these colors, I don't have to stick with them. I can change them as they go around. And I can dry brushing it and play around with it. I can take a paper towel and I can move color around. Now pull the tape off. I like using scotch tape better than masking tape it gives a really nice clean edge.

Now we have a variation of color we have a variation and edge. The colors are all kind of blending together. So I think next to it, I am going to not take but I'll do something else. I am going to add some water to the color and try painting a stripe like that. When you add water to the acrylic paint, if you were using oil paint, you would be adding turpentine. When you add the solvents to the paints, then you're breaking down the binder and it gets very watery and washy and is easy to vary.

As you can see. This variation was created just because I used a diluted version whereas this one I had to really work at it. What can I do different Next, let's see the next stripe, I can just change colors and I'll do an even stripe, maybe not. I'll try to make even but I'll leave it a little bit streaky like that I kind of feel like going into using the back of my I don't like that. I'll go back to this. A lot of variation is about playing around.

What I don't have on this palette that I also recommend is having some kind of medium. Now this is the open acrylic from golden that I'm using. And so I'm going to use their medium. I always put the medium in the middle of the palette, so that because mediums in acrylic are white when they're wet and dry, clean. I don't want to get confused between the white paint and this white medium that's going to go clear. But what's good about having medium in on your palette is that you can now make a color transparent.

So I can take a color I am going to pick an unmixed color so you can see what happens when you add medium to it. So the mix medium in with it and this means it's going to be more transparent, which is another way of saying that you're going to be able to see through it what's underneath, which is white but it'll still change the quality of the paint. And I think it's time to change brushes. Notice every moment I'm trying to change something the color the brush, how I apply it, am I diluting it with water, am I adding medium and this is what makes painting fun for me but Hopefully more interesting in the outcome here is what's called a glaze. When you mix this much medium in with a color, it's called a glaze and look at how different it is from the wash from a solid color.

And from blending like that. I noticed that I'm making all my stripes the same width. So hopefully it's not too late to change that. We go make this one bigger, and then I will make a small one next to it. And I'll just do one more thing just to show you all these different ways that you can use to very even just simple stripes, and that would be to overlap. So right now I've been doing stripes, one next to the other.

I'm going to take one stripe and overlap it. Let's see Now, this is also something I love to do, I like to manipulate the brush in my hand. So I'm going to do it again and watch this. I'm putting it down flat. And then as I'm turning it, I'm going to turn my brush and these flat brushes then change to a thin line and then release it. So just handling the brush makes a whole different line.

Okay, well I just wanted to give you some ideas of even though we're just working with stripes, how to vary something. So even if you were working with shapes, flowers in a floral arrangement, hair in somebody's portrait and abstraction. Try as you're painting to every few seconds, change something, change your brush, change how you hold it, change your breath, change the color, change, the dilution, all the things that I mentioned here.