Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Pastel Water and Rocks


Obviously, my title doesn't refer to the colors in this pastel painting. I'm having a great time with the flexibility of pastels and learning to block in color to start. I'm always open to critiques.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

More Pastel



I did this waterfall mostly from my head with only a little from a teeny part of a photo I'd taken in Scotland. The water view is from the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine. I can see that the horizon in this one isn't straight. I was working to paint recognizable rocks with light on them in both paintings. They're different kinds of rocks and I'm especially pleased that I managed to get the roughness of the cliff rocks. Both paintings are better viewed from some distance and are brighter if you click for a bigger version. Critiques?

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Water and Rocks


Another pastel, I did this from a photo I took in Scotland. This time I did a very sketchy value drawing in dark blue then used a wet watercolor brush to create value washes. When the paper was completely dry, I switched to pastels.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Aspen


I did this one at the same workshop as the Scottish Burn. This one was done with warm colors over a cool purple underpainting. Also pastel. I'm not crazy about the purple sky, but it is the complement of yellow and it's warmer than blue.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Scottish Burn


Fran and I took a pastel workshop today and I painted this picture of a burn in Scotland. We began by doing a value sketch with charcoal and using only 4 values. Then talked about warm and cool colors (reds. oranges, yellows for the former; greens, blues and purples for cool). After we determined whether our painting would be cool or warm, we covered the whole thing with an underpainting of a complementary color. In this case, I used orange. At last we put on the colors we wanted. You can see quite a bit or orange peeking out in the light greens and in some of the light areas in the water. A big challenge was the darks in the rocks for which I finally used dark purple and some green rather than the "real" color of dark brown. At the very end I put in the bright red flowers, just to grab your eye.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Colorado Valley II


Done from a photo I took when we were in Colorado recently. We were looking down from a hillside into a broad, broad, very dry valley. This is mostly watercolor with some pastel added for emphasis.