Dawn Skyscape in Oil Pastels

Dawn Skyscape 5" x 7"

Neopastel on Dawn Pink Canson Mi-Tientes

This morning I started a landscape series just working scenes out in principle, using one of my favorite oil pastels brands. I love the Caran d'Ache Neopastels - they blend well, mix easily, have medium softness but a very high pigment load so they're good and opaque.

An email student showed me some works and I needed to demonstrate how to control the land area to make the sky predominate in a skyscape. I added a little water feature to reflect the sky and lead into it, played with various colors and cloud shapes and did this entirely by design and memory. Some things just work well that way and I've sketched this type of cloud from life many times!

That's the key to memory drawing. Do the same subject over and over, preferably many small easy sketches as opposed to a few careful ones. It'll get to become second nature and you can pull it out no matter when you want it.

Day 21: Red Peonies

Red Peonies 

6" square, Sennelier oil pastels on watercolor journal

I finished and posted this yesterday on Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, but forgot to blog again here. So today may have a double post due to catching up!

I actually sketched this from a photo by Ural Jones on WetCanvas back on the 20th, but did the chrysanthemums faster since I knew this one would be some work and I wasn't sure what medium I'd use for it.

Sennelier oil pastels are the very softest. They are very nearly paint, with a texture similar to oil sticks. Blended them with a Derwent color shaper, which I happened to have handy. I also used a little odorless mineral spirits to dissolve the light green and yellow background elements for a smoother texture, saving the heaviest painterly textures for the flowers.

I think it's one of my better compositions, surely one of the more complex ones. I like the value pattern and the way the red-green color harmony breaks the mid-dark area dramatically into foreground flowers and background leaves. The colors pleased me and the whole painting came out better than I expected.

My first thought was to use gouache or watercolor for it, but I like this better. Toward the end I wasn't sure if it was too rough and textured. Then I stood back and pow, yeah, that was just the "under my nose" effect. You can't really tell about whether a painting works when you're focused on one small area right on top of it. The best test is to stand back. 

If standing back physically is too hard, as it sometimes is for me, takng a photo and looking at the thumbnail is a good way to get an overall view of the composition. When I saw this an inch across, it surprised me how well it hangs together. Definitely a step forward in composition!

Square Fruit Still Life 30 in 30 Day 2

Pears and Orange

6" square pastel on paper

Second day of Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge. I painted earlier tonight at 8pm and added more forms, this time in a different color harmony. Originally I had black lines but warmed them with a dark brown.

Once again I painted intuitively. I focused on the color harmony and went almost abstract working with the shapes. I worked from life again, my lunch included a real pear so I posed that with my light yellow green plastic pear and a very red-orange orange that caught some light on a section of the sphere.

The live pear was the same color as the plastic one. That didn't suit me so I used warm yellows in the same value pattern. This one started with Oyster Canson Mi-Tientes paper color - a light muted orange. So that called me to use orange, yellow and green with a red-orange form and then pink and lavender accents toward the back - moving around the spectrum toward blue but opposite the greens.

Hm... that's the full spectrum. Cool. It hasn't got that rainbow feel because the background accents are lighter and  less intense. I like the intense spectrum as a color harmony and may use that on another one, just go through the spectrum and sort the colors by values. But this pastels set has a blue violet and a magenta, not a strong mid violet.

So my palettes are also exploring the 24 color Cretacolor Pastels Carre' range as a limited palette in itself. I haven't used other pastels yet, set these supplies up as a physical convenience to be able to paint on bad days with field supplies.

At least one will be pen and colored pencils, this month's CP article. All will have a theme borrowed from the September Pastel Spotlight on WetCanvas.com - Line. That lets me explore any subject but keep it simplified, and I can explore different ways to use lines in painting. Yet use whatever medium fits for the day's energy, time and physical ability.

Two days in and I have hope of completing it this time. Wish me luck!