How to use rocks in nature to create eye-catching black & white abstract compositions

There is no doubt that creating abstract art can be a little confusing and intimidating at times. This exercise will show you how to use the natural world as a source of inspiration – it’s the original abstract artwork in my opinion! So with a little instruction from me, plus a little imagination, it's never been easier to get started making beautiful pieces from nature.

NATURE’S SHAPES, PATTERNS & TEXTURES

The natural world is a vibrant and inspiring source of inspiration for all artists. Painters will often choose a traditional subject from nature, whether it's eye-catching rolling hill landscapes or colourful flowers. But one of my favourite exercises is to create abstract compositions by using elements from rocks. 

I find the shapes, patterns and textures of rocks fascinating. There is always so much detail created by shadows cast across different surfaces and these ‘naturally abstracted designs’ can be the perfect starting point from which to start creating a basic understructure or road map for my artworks.

ON THE ROCKS

Here in Kiama, I’m very lucky to have world-famous basalt rock formations on my doorstep. One particular spot known as Bombo Quarry has thousands of beautiful rock formations that have provided countless hours worth of inspiration for me, as I looked through the viewfinder of my camera for new and interesting compositions. 

Any rock with cracks will do. Roughly draw the outline as the basis for your composition. I have done this in photoshop as it's quicker for me to demonstrate this exercise, but feel free to try this with a pencil, paints and a canvas or paper.

Once you have your outline, play with black and white (and mix your greys). You are welcome to add one colour to this if you want, but it's better to keep it simple as it's more an exercise in playing with tonal variation rather than colour at this stage. 

Start to play with lights, mid tones and darks. Keep making changes until you feel your design is a good balance of lights, mediums and darks. This was my design at the start.

You’ll want to continue to balance your lights, midtones and darks over and over. You’ll see that I've added a little colour to mine here, but I always take a black and white picture (alongside for comparison) at the end of a project to ensure that when all the colour information is stripped out, I still get a good gauge on the balance. 

The photos from any rock hunting adventure will show you how beautifully diverse nature really is! You never know what's around the corner, so make sure you have your phone or camera handy to capture all of those magical design ideas as they pop up in nature. 

Once you have gathered an assortment of rock photographs, it's a simple process to figure out which designs should be transferred onto canvas.

Just start by selecting your favourites – the ones that are the strongest compositions. You'll notice which ones offer a more interesting division of space and are pleasing to the eye.

BUILDING YOUR DESIGN ON CANVAS (OR SCREEN)

As seen above, you can start by roughly drawing an outline of your rock design onto the canvas with a pencil or marker.

Precision isn't necessary here. This is purely an exercise in breaking up space into interesting shapes of different sizes. Mistakes aren’t going to ruin anything since we are only concentrating on creating understructure for our artwork at this stage. There's still so much opportunity to refine our design as we go along, without worrying about it looking perfect or making mistakes. 

Remember that to keep things simple, for this exercise I recommend using only black and white paint and mixing grey from these. These provide an excellent range of tones: dark through light and every other shade that falls between them. (We’ll explore colour mixing in a later lesson.)

I have included an image of a Grey Scale & Value Finder that I use in my studio made by the colour wheel company. It clearly shows different values ranging from BLACK (the darkest dark) to WHITE (the lightest light). These tonal ranges are what you’ll be looking for when playing with your black and white paint. By playing around with simple design exercises such as this one, you could literally save yourself hours or days of work down the track while trying to resolve your artworks.

Complete half a dozen of these black and white composition exercises –  created either using paint or digitally! I guarantee there will be a few pieces that you absolutely love which will be perfect studies for larger abstract artworks. And plenty more inspiration out in nature, just waiting to be discovered.

Until next time,

Stay Creative! :) 

xo Sharon