From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

839 Painting like Joan Miró in Adobe Sketch

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

839 Painting like Joan Miró in Adobe Sketch

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. I've always been a fan of 20th century art, but recently I got hooked on abstract art. That is art that is abstracted from organic or figurative forms. Like this figure here. A head does not have to be a head, a leg does not have to be a leg, a thing we cannot speak of can be a thing that we can. Which is why today I'm going to show you how to paint like Joan Miro. Joan, I'm sure I'm butchering his name, but it's actually two syllables, because he was Catalonian and this is his 1978 painting Figure, star. Now this isn't the real thing, this is my painting of it, because I'm painting like Joan Miro. Could be something altogether different, but still so Miro. Now I'll be painting inside an app called Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. As with any app, especially one from Adobe, it might not be around anymore by the time you watch this, which is why you can use any drawing or painting app that you like. Or you can use Photoshop combined with a Wacom tablet or Photoshop on the Mac along with an iPad as a second display. There are all kinds of options. So don't get hung up on the tools, get hung up on the art. Here, let me show you exactly how this, the thing you see beside me know, works. So here we are inside Photoshop looking at that artwork once again that I drew based on the piece Figure, star by Joan Miro. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my iPad, but it could just as easily be an Android device, and I'll launch Adobe Sketch, which as you can see here, is also called Adobe Photoshop Sketch. Although you could be working with some other drawing application. And then I'll open this project here and I'll create a new document by tapping the plus sign in the bottom right corner of the screen and then I'll go up to the top left corner and select my iPad Pro Landscape setting right there and I will create a new document. Now you should know that because I'm left-handed I've set things up a little differently, so that the brushes appear on the right-hand side of the screen and the layers appear on the left-hand side. Now I'm going to start things off with this second to top pen, this guy right here. Notice that I've set the color to black, which is very important, and I've gone ahead and made the size of the brush a little bigger and you can do that just by dragging on this size bubble here. And notice if I tap this little settings icon down at the bottom we are working with the Ink Pen. Now I'm going to switch to the full screen by tapping this icon in the top right corner of the screen, which goes ahead and hides the interface. And now I'll go ahead and draw a kind of body. Now notice it's a little lumpy, not very happy with that brush stroke. And so if you want to undo something in Adobe Sketch you just do a two finger drag to the left. And in my case I've got to do so three times in a row. So two finger drag from the right to the left. And then I'll go ahead and try to see if I can draw something that's a little smoother. And sometimes Sketch has a tendency of delivering blobs of paint every once in a while, so I'll just go ahead and make this side a little thicker, just by drawing it in. And again, I'm working with an Apple Pencil, so this happens to be a second generation Pencil, which allows for pressure sensitive input and you can draw it directly on the surface of the tablet, which is totally awesome, of course. And I'll go ahead and make this guy thicker as well. And I have to say that I have been doing a lot of drawing on my iPad recently and I am just loving it. All right, so that's the body, let's say. Now I'm going to draw a kind of neck and I'm going to have it come down a little bit and end with this kind of blob of a head. So obviously we're not going for anything even mildly resembling realism. Instead I'm trying to communicate in that line and dot language that Miro pioneered. And so I'll go ahead and give this guy some kind of cartoon feet right here. Maybe make them a little thicker at the end, like so. And that helps to give this guy a kind of action stance, as if he's almost falling over. All right, now I'll draw that other blob that appears over on the left hand side of the figure, perhaps the sun, don't know. And then I'll go ahead and draw a star. Now in the case of the actual piece, Figure, Star, Miro created an eight-pointed star. I'm just going to create a six pointed star, so that it's a kind of asterisk in the sky. All right, I'm going to go ahead and bring back the interface by tapping that top right icon once again. And this time I'm going to switch brushes by clicking on the brush icon up there at the top and then selecting this top brush, which by default is Graphite, by the way. You can see it right here, Graphite Pencil. And I want it to be a little bigger, so I'll just go ahead and drag the size up. I'm happy enough with the color. And now I just want to create kind some extra lines down here at this location in order to fill out the artwork. And it's almost as if we're painting in some kind of depth where the body is concerned. Now notice if I zoom in here you can see that I'm making some of the details lighter, because I'm painting with gray, as opposed to black. Now I can go ahead and change that color if I want to by tapping on the color circle right there and taking it down to black, like so. And then I might go ahead and reduce the size of my brush and paint in some black graphite, like so, but we're still going to have that problem where I'm lightening the artwork in the background. What I want to do at this point is multiply those brush strokes, but I went ahead and painted them on that same layer, which is really a problem. So what I'm going to do is undo all those graphite strokes by tapping on this undo icon right here, which is going to bring up this clock, and I'll tap on the clock. And now notice that you can drag back and you can go very far back indeed if you want to, or then you can go forward in time until I'm seeing that first graphite brush stroke, that's the bad stroke, so I'll go ahead and undo this point here. And then I'll add a layer by tapping on the plus sign above the layers over here on the left-hand side of the screen and selecting Sketch Layer. Image Layer is if you want to import a photographic image, by the way. We just want to draw, so I'll tap Sketch Layer. And now I'll try again. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush a little bit more and then I'm just going to go ahead and paint in these brush strokes right here. Now that they're black they're not really lightening the brush strokes on the background, so we don't have to worry about the multiply blend mode, but we do have the option of changing the mode if we want to and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. But first I'm just going to go ahead and paint this stuff right here, let's say. And maybe paint around into this region and I'm going to fill in some of this light detail in the top right corner of the body. Not sure if you saw what I was doing there, but in any event, maybe I'll add a little bit of a graphite brush stroke here too. And then let's say it was gray as opposed to black and you wanted to make sure you were multiplying things in, then you would tap on that Sketch Layer thumbnail right there in order to bring up this Sketch Layer panel and see the word Normal? Just tap on it and you have access to all of the blend modes that are available to you inside Photoshop. So I'll go ahead and tap Multiply here and I should say, I'm recording this thing a couple of months in advance. I don't know if Adobe Sketch will still be out there. That just occurred to me. We may have Photoshop running on the iPad by then, that is supposed to happen at some point. So again, you can use any app that you like. All right, now you may recall that the original artwork features a couple of squares, one red and one yellow. And so I'm going to create those on an independent layer by tapping on the little plus sign. Now, of course, Miro did not have access to layers, so in a way I'm cheating. All he had was acrylic paint that he kept layering on top of the canvas. So this is a great example of how technology helps us. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the Ink Pen right there, that second guy, tap on it again in order to bring up these options. Tap on the color and drag this guy all the way out to the right-hand side and then increase the brightness, so that we have red. And now I'll just go ahead and hide that guy. And I'll paint in a square right about at this location. Now I'm not interested in getting an exact square or altogether filling it in for that matter either. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush and have a little bit of fun with this guy. So we want to keep things expressive, again, we're not shooting for anything resembling realism at this point. And I might even go ahead and drag this guy down a little bit, like so. And then maybe fill it in a little more, like this. So it's really up to you how your shapes look in the end. All right, now I'm going to tap the color again and this time I'm going to drag up, so that we have a shade of yellow. And I'll go ahead and create another square at this location here and fill it in with a little obvious gestural detail here. And something like this I think looks pretty nice. And now, just to center my artwork on screen I'll just give it a pinch, like that, so a two finger pinch. And then I'll go ahead and switch to the full screen mode, so that we can take in what we've created so far. And that's at least one way to paint like Joan Miro, in my case, armed with an iPad Pro running Adobe Photoshop Sketch. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have two, count them, two followup movies in which I take my artwork so far and I add a kind of watercolor wash of a background. And then I'll show you how to sign your artwork as if you were Joan Miro himself to create this final masterpiece. Excited? I am too. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

Contents