Prompt #63 - Fill the whole page

Despite of my rage, I'm still gonna...

Sep 25, 2023

Hi, I‘m Lorena and welcome to The Stress Less Pencil. Together, we create art to make us feel good, not to make it look good. All weekly prompts are designed for total beginners and experienced artists alike, so come join us.

green leafed plant in brick wall — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

The blank page - killer of ideas, the final frontier, the big boss fight.

I often sit down, ready to get artsy, but then look down and my mind goes as blank as the page before me. I start thinking about the what (to draw) and the how (to draw it) and come up with nada, nix, zilch.

Eventually, I found that the best way to get started is to simply get started. So today, I want to share my quick little warm up exercise with you, that can help you get the ball rolling.

The Activity: Fill the whole page

This works great with any medium you want to work in afterwards, but if I had to choose I'd recommend the messier ones - oil pastels, watercolour, acrylics, or gouache.

Step 1 - Choose your colours

Choose four to six colours you want to work with. While you could work in monochrome, for this exercise it's good to mix all different colours of light and dark shades. We still want to limit ourselves to a handful of colours so that we don't fall into the overthinking trap.

blue red yellow and green wooden doors — Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Step 2 - Fill the page

Using no strategy in particular, start filling your page. Smudge colours into each other, paint them over each other, switch them up often, and don't try to control the outcome. The only goals we have is to a) use every colour we picked at least once and b) fill the whole page so that there's no more white paper visible in the end.

Keep going. And then keep going a bit more. You can feel it when you start painting from your gut, rather than your head. You're done when you're no longer worrying about what it will look like.