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.