Abstract painting "Spastic Colon" 12"x12" acrylic on board

Work in progress (or maybe it's done, I haven't decided) for Exercise 4 of Karine Swenson's online class, intro to abstract painting. 12"x12" on board, primed with gesso. I used Golden Acrylics for this.

On this piece, I keep being pulled from light to dark values. First I add light lines, then I add dark lines, then I cover them back up with gesso and add light again. My favorite part about these are the dots of color on the sides. That was made by covering everything except the exposed color with gesso. The paint underneath was still slightly wet so after brushing through it several times, the color came up into the gesso to make a lightly colored gesso. I like that part a lot.

This started off as a bright yellow swoop with some dark blue lines and light pink around it. This is several layers later. The top circle had bright orange next to yellow (like the squares) and the contrast of that bothered me - it looked too bright, too much like candy corn... So I painted over it and I might add a bit of white paint mixed with gel medium to tone down the boldness of the orange and yellow squares on the side.

Maybe this is weird, but I feel like calling it "Spastic Colon" because of the curving shape and the various 'appendages' coming off it.