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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.