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.

4 comments:

Terry said...

That is really lovely

Bonny said...

The pastel painting is really beautiful! I love the various shades of green and your water is so convincing. Lovely!

Anonymous said...

The result is outstanding and who would have thought the first layer would have been a warm color---but it certainly adds to the depth and interest of the painting. SueD

Anonymous said...

I love the greens best!

Debbie from WCW