Something Different

It's still pastel, but certainly different from woods. A friend gave me "Watercolor by Design" by Marianne Brown for Christmas and last night I started reading it. It describes a dozen different composition schemes, using many non-objective paintings for examples. This morning when I woke up I had the beginnings of this painting in my mind. Now, which way is up??

Woods . . . again

I guess I'd better call these my "woods series" since that seems to be what I'm drawn to painting these days. Maybe because I'm frequently in the woods walking the dogs. I love it when they can run free. This is a pastel. There's a person (not me, I'm behind the camera) and a dog. It was sort of an experiment in putting a small amount of light values in a mostly dark painting. I'm always open for comments and critiques.

Frosty Morning

Pastel. I painted the whole sheet of white Wallis sanded paper a bright, red-orange (then made sure it was all dry) before I began using pastels on this. I chose the underpainting color to be more or less the complementary color of the final painting. If you look closely, you can see where the orange peeks through, giving the whole painting a liveliness. I love the intense blue and gold through the middle of this with the cooler, frosty green in the foreground. The long shadows give the sense of early morning, too.

Sunflower

I started another pastel of woods the other day and it wasn't going well at all, so I ran the paper under the faucet and washed out all I had done. This is Wallis sanded paper and it's pretty sturdy. When it had dried, I grabbed a photo of a sunflower I had hanging around and painted that instead. I forgot that the size paper I was using needs some cropping to make it a standard size, so if I frame this it will be expensive, but I like all the colors.