Paint Free - Timed Painting Exercises

I started taking another online course a couple of weeks ago that works on just playing and having some fun in order to find your creative style. I am much in need of this as I find a great deal of pressure in "all pieces must be masterpieces".  The previous course I took helped me get painting again but I was still struggling with finding my style of painting.

So we were instructed to pick a couple of colours plus black and white and paint within a time limit. We were never to stop painting or think about what we were doing.  This is an amazing release, there are no rules or right or wrong in what we are doing. It's very freeing...no pressure to produce, just play and enjoy the feeling of the paint and how we use our brushes. 

So this is one of the pieces I did that also involved timed painting periods but also thinking and feeling something one loved as a child.  This took some thought and I came up with two things, this painting is about my love of the sound of frogs singing in the springtime. So I painted a sound....I stopped painting when the timer went off...a good thing because it's easy to keep going and loose the vitality of the painting. I am very happy with this exercise.

I did a second painting in this method about something I loved as a child and I painted one of my childhood stuffed animals who still exists to this day....Mr Putty Pants.

I've always wanted to do a kids book with him but didn't know where to start with the illustrating style of it.  This exercise gave me that and I think I now have a great beginning to knowing how I want others to perceive him in his book, The Adventures of Mr Putty Pants...coming soon.