Colorful Tomato 2

Colorful Tomatoes 2

5" x 7" pastel on paper

Testing out my new Caran d'Ache pastels, the set of 15 has all the colors Charlotte Herczfeld used in Pastel Brands Matter. It's one of my favorite demo videos and one of the few that I ever did any version of the painting. Now this is my second go at it! My first, I drew a wide short beefsteak tomato and used softer pastels on Mi-Tientes.

Once again even my version came out bright and fun! Maybe next time I'll do this with a pear or orange or apple!

Colourful Apples in Perspective

Colourful Apples in Perspective

8" x 10" pastel on paper

This painting took all of April if you count the planning time. The Spotlight challenge theme was on atmospheric perspective. Most of the references were landscapes with rows of receding blue hills, something I've always liked and enjoyed painting. I just didn't feel like doing the obvious and chose the one and only still life reference, three apples in a row on a white table. 

The far apple was actually the red-gold one, the front apple a red-purple in the reference. My first thought was to reverse their colors and exaggerate atmospheric perspective, since the yellow was quite warmer and brighter than that front apple. So I switched their colors, worked it out, did the first layers on non sanded paper and ran into a lot of days when my back went out. Other than tiredness and pain, I can't say why April was that slow.

I finished and posted this on the very last day of the challenge but at least did it!

Maybe I'll do more in May. I hope so! It's hard getting back in the rhythm of daily sketching and painting when the elevator's out and I keep overdoing it.

Colourful Rose aka Red Red Rose

Colourful Rose aka Red, Red Rose

6" square

Terry Ludwig pastels on white Colourfix Suede pastel card

Photo reference by DAK723 on WetCanvas

This one is another "Pastel Spotlight" challenge painting. This month's challenge theme is Red. DAK723 hosts the challenges and had already done blue, green, yellow and maybe orange, think orange was one. So I was very glad he put a rose into the lineup.

It was pink, a medium-dark pink like hot pink. And this rose is not quite it. I changed it substantially in the painting, abandoned the reference entirely somewhere around doing the middle of the sketch. In simplifying it I changed the interior petals to my artistic tastes. I made the light stronger and more directional. How that worked ultimately was that it looks more as if it's washed by a dapple of sun and implies a shade tree above the entire scene - an effect I love.

I also succeeded in two things. You can't photo a red rose. I've tried. What comes out is scarlet with black squiggles and no values in between. I've looked hard at some professional photos of red roses and seen the way the dark reds vanish suddenly, even after serious photoshop work. Well, it can be done with a painting! Yay!

And so the color was entirely from memory. I worked out both the rendering for bright scarlet roses and for the deep red velvety ones I always loved. Where the deepest darks really do sometimes go almost to black. I figured out how to do that by way of the underpainting colors, and so there will be more red roses to come as I play with the results.

I don't much like Terry Ludwig on Colourfix Suede as much as Pan Pastels or firmer pastels, but it worked better than plain paper. I would have preferred sanded, but now I know, use firmer pastels. This kind of experiment always helps. I also used an alcohol wash for the underpainting or I probably would have killed the tooth in the first layer.

Plain paper, coated paper, sanded paper of different grits - all pastel surfaces have favorite pastels and all pastel brands have favorite surfaces. The fun is finding out what the combinations do. If I did this again with Pan Pastels and accents in hard pastel or pastel pencil it might come out great - but would still be a very different rose!

Colourful Cherries in pastel

Colourful Cherries 

5" x 7"

Terry Ludwig pastels on Uart 400 sanded pastel paper

Photo reference by sirbonetta on WetCanvas 

This month's Pastel Spotlight Challenge on WetCanvas.com is themed on the color Red. I liked most of the references but the one that really sang to me was a bowl of cherries with these three off to the side on a white table. I left out the bowl and painted them larger than life in a very tight crop.

I used the four stage Colourist method as I've done before with Colourful Lemons and Colourful Bananas months ago. Once again the painting sings in person, the cherries shine with color and the whole piece has a lot of richness. Gradating the background eliminated the boredom of a plain white flat surface and also flattened it out, though the shapes of the shadows did that too. 

Shadows are nuanced with reflected color. The white surface reflects up on the shiny surfaces of the cherries along with some out of sight object to the far left that broke the reflection. The corner of the table is visible in those reflections. I loved the way they shaded and the nuances of the leaf. Some texturing strokes created lovely details and veining by accident so I kept all that and didn't do anything more to it after Stage 3. Even the stems came out well and the last bright highlights went on over what was probably 8 or 9 layers of very soft pastels.

I did use an alcohol underpainting for the bright first layer just as I did in yesterday's landscape and love that effect too. These super soft Ludwig pastels wear down faster than my medium-soft pastels but give a lovely glow and they do go on so opaque that I can get away with bright near-whites over dark near-black colors! 

I spent all day at this one, it was four different sessions each about two hours. So this would have been a full day's work in itself despite the small size. So worth it though when I look at the results!

To learn the Colourist method I recommend Capturing Radiant Light & Color in Pastels and Oils by Susan Sarback, who was my teacher's teacher. Charlotte Herczfeld aka Colorix taught me this method in "Exploring Soft Pastels: Still Life the Colourful Way" on WetCanvas starting November 2009 and it's changed how I look at color, how I organize my pastels, how many I need to paint anything I want to and everything about how I paint in any medium. That's how intense it was for changing my view of color. I finally understood things in color theory that never made sense before and didn't connect with my painting experience thanks to her course. It's free if you join WetCanvas, anyone who reads through and does the exercises will get help from those of us who took it when she was posting it every day.

Susan Sarback studied with Henry Hensche, and the Cape Cod School did a lot of this sort of work in oil painting. The method's a bit different in oils but the color principles are the same. The main thing in oils is to leave a white area around the color masses and not do edges till late in the process so they don't get muddied if they're supposed to be hard.