Friday's painting

Here is my painting for today. This is pastel on 5x7 pastel board. I was working from a photo that my husband took somewhere a few years ago.

Wednesday--reclaiming a piece gone wrong

My painting for today almost ended up in the waste basket! I started this piece in colored pencil on a 4x4 piece of Ampersand Clay Board. Remember, part of the exercise is to try new products, techniques, and ideas. I don't like working on board with pencils. It has so much texture that it wears the pencils down very quickly, it takes a very long time to fill the texture so that you get a finished-looking piece. I was very unhappy with the results I was getting after about 40 minutes of working mostly on filling in background. At that point, I almost threw in the towel and threw out the piece. So, I walked away and thought about it for a while. I decided to try overlaying the colored pencil with pastels. In the end, I had a piece that is worth keeping. This is one seagull from a photo of a flock of seagulls that I am planning to use for a large pastel painting. I used my Pan Pastels to lay in the sky. Then I went to my soft pastels and worked on the gull. I used Conte pencils for some of the details, but they were not very effective over the colored pencil.

The exercise continues

Here is my daily painting for today, Tuesday. It is 4.5x6 on Mi-Teintes paper painted in pastels.

Monday painting

Today's painting is a little 3x5 pastel on board of iris. I was experimenting with the Pan Pastels on the background. They are very nice and blend easily to create nice color mixes and lay down in a very smooth application.

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.

Thursday's Effort

I am sticking to my plan of a painting a day. I am giving myself 1-2 hours in the morning to work on and complete a small painting. Here is today's painting. It is called "Gardening". It is pastel on 5x7 grey pastel board.

Painting for today

I have decided to try to make time to do a small painting every day. Today I got out the pastels once again and another 5x7 pastel board. This little piece is sketched from a set-up of a little Longaberger basket filled with small artificial pears and apples. For the background, I applied several colors and then used a watercolor brush and denatured alcohol to blend them together. Notice the left-hand light source. This is a challenge for me as I am so completely right dominant!

Today's Painting

I spent a little time after my student left this morning playing with my pastels. I had a 5x7 Pastel Board that I wanted to try out. This product is made by Ampersand. It has a sanded (textured) surface and comes in grey, sand or white. I used the sand colored surface for this piece.

Pastel Sketch

This is a small experimental version of what will ultimately be a much larger piece. It is done on Mi-Teintes paper with soft pastels and is about 9x12. The final version of the piece will be approximately 16x28 to fit in a very large frame. It is time to get it up on my easel and start working on it.