Before all hell broke loose, I registered for Nicolas Wilton’s popular 12-week ART2LIFE Creative Visionary Program. If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s how Nicolas explains it:
The program is designed for beginner to advanced artists who are interested in significantly shifting and improving their art. This program will guide you into a better understanding of your own unique creative expression. Over the 12 weeks, we will be taking a deep dive into all the 6 Art2Life Principles – Design, Value, Color, Texture, Risk and Soul.
Gaining a thorough understanding of the nuances and interconnectedness of these fundamental principles will allow you to have tremendous creative freedom in any kind of art-making you desire to pursue. Whether you paint realistically or abstractly, draw, paint, collage or any combination of the three, this intensive program will give you all the tools you need. The program is principle-based and its primary purpose is to clarify and strengthen your own authentic creative expression.
The program and the Art2life team of coaches provides you with an amazing community of supportive artists, concise ways to create a more sustainable, joyful art practice and most importantly, the fundamental art-making principles to finally bring your Art to life.
The program is intensive and to do it even nominally, requires several hours a week, and that is without doing any painting. Then, all hell broke loose when Covid-19 began gaining ground and I found myself with extra time to jump all in to the ART2LIFE Creative Visionary Program. However, this post isn’t about the program, but about how Nicholas has all of his paints in squeeze bottles, often the type that restaurants use for ketchup and mustard. One of the benefits of using the squeeze bottles is the consistency of the paint, not too thin (fluid paints don’t work for this program) and not too thick (like tube paints). Nicolas has his own line of paint that are the perfect consistency, but Nicholas is generous with information and he has shared how to get paint to the right consistency.
For the past two weeks, I have been on a mad tear sorting all of my paints, throwing out old dried up ones, and then combining like colors into a mixing bowl, whipping, stirring, adding mediums and water, and then pouring my energized and reformulated paints into plastic condiment bottles. Most of the time I mixed like colors together, even if they were from different brands, but sometimes I just mixed up an assortment of colors, like several different greens, which after mixing I dubbed “Weirdo Green.”
It has consumed me, it’s been messy, but the end result is a beautiful cacophony of colors. No more excuses not to paint.
A side benefit in the clean up process, is that I started wiping excess paint onto a large canvas and I’ve ended up with a vibrant first layer.
