More autumn trees

Am I in a rut, or what? But I'm much happier with this painting than with the last. This time I concentrated on putting down the shapes until I had the paper all covered. Then I smeared the whole thing with my fingers and sprayed on some workable fixative. I tried to keep the texture and detail to the foreground leaves, although I did refine some of the edges of the previous shapes. The tree trunks and the branches went in practically last. The result seems to have more depth and is less busy.

Yellow Trees

Pastels again. I like the way the pastels feel on the paper, especially the softer ones (they're all the "soft" or chalky pastels). And I like the way it's so easy to add light over dark, although I still tend to work from light to dark, a watercolor habit, rather than dark to light as one would with oils. That's probably why I get all the white speckles in the painting which you see better if you click on this painting to the right to see the larger version. I may do this again with some sort of underpainting. This painting is done from a couple of photos I took while walking the dogs.

Sunflower

One of Fran's clients brought her a bouquet of flowers, including a sunflower. I painted it in pastel today, on a scrap of paper 5" x 9.5". Odd size, which will be annoying to frame, but it works for this single blossom. I love the feel of the pastel on the paper but I find it difficult knowing exactly where the line will be, unlike a pointed, round watercolor brush. It's much easier to do bigger work than this for that reason. I learned today that layering a dark color under another dark color gives an even darker and richer color than either of the originals. Fun.

Woods Light

Back to watercolor! I painted this from a photo I took the other day while a friend and I were walking in the woods . . . with the dogs along, too, of course. She had her camera with her and I grabbed it to take this picture. The leaves are gradually changing here, after a record-breaking, hot October and the woods are gorgeous. I think they're gorgeous any time of the year, actually.

The painting and the photo of it are brighter than this Blogspot-generated size. This looks better if you click on it and get the bigger version.

Zinnias and Mums

A fellow painter brought these flowers in the beautiful, glass pitcher to our studio group this morning. So this is painted, with pastels, from "life,"