Friday's Challenge

Today I challenged myself to take a single sketch and make two different small paintings from it. I did the sketch during a meeting I was attending yesterday afternoon. There was a plant in the lobby that I could see from the meeting room and I roughly sketched it in my notes. One version of the branch is primarily a cool palette with warm yellow-green accents. The surface is a 4x5 Masonite board that I apparently painted with a base coat of green acrylic paint a while ago.

The second version is a primarily warm palette and is painted on a 3x5 fine-grained canvas attached to a board. The warmer version is more vibrant and exciting. The smaller board forced a different placement of the subject and the result was a more interesting design as well.

I didn't like working on the acrylic base. It was grainy but the texture was uneven and it was difficult to apply the pastel the way I wanted. It would not be my first choice for a surface. The canvas was not bad to work on but would take a bit of getting used to.