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.

Pine from Memory

Pine from memory

5" x 7"

Rembrandt pastels on gray Strathmore Artagain paper

Experimenting with sky holes, asymmetry, graceful shape and painting from memory, I wound up giving it dawn light and snow on the ground - but not on the branches, where it blew off in a strong wind. I've seen pines in a snowy area that lost their snow to wind or sun before all the snow on the ground melted.

I should have been doing my novel, but I painted first. Happily the book's going well now so I took a break to post this. Onward with both! Sometimes it's good to break away for a little while just to paint.

Shimmering Dawn Skyscape

Shimmering Dawn Skyscape

8" x 10" horizontal

Pearlescent Pan Pastels and other Pan Pastels

on Aquabee Hemp Draw multimedia paper

photo reference from DAK723 on WetCanvas

I planned this painting four days ago when I first saw the reference in the October Pastel Spotlight. Theme was "Orange" and the photo's a lot more vivid. I wanted the pearlescent effect, but that lightened it so much it looked more like a dawn to me. The ground is less violet in person, getting the colors adjusted for the sky to look true made it look very violet.

More details on the materials in my Art Supply Reviews blog entry!

Dawn Waterfall in Oil Pastels

Dawn Waterfall

Sometimes when I start a painting, it doesn't go the way I planned. My reference for Dawn Waterfall is a black and white photo provided by Johannes Vloothuis for this week's homework in "Essentials of Painting Rocks." He deliberately desaturated one of his waterfall references so that we would have to create the colors of the scene from memory and artistic judgment.

Johannes also specificed "make the rocks a muted reddish orange color." Well, this painting came out great but this one doesn't fit the "muted" category. I started from the sky, shaded in that beautiful dawn-sky gradient with silhouetted early morning violet trees... and from that point I could not put the foreground rocks around the waterfall in a muted noon light color. I had to bring the same violet into their shadows and gild their upper surfaces with the dawn light.

So I love the painting but I might be doing another from this reference. There's no reason I can't do more than one version of the assignment and I love this scene. I might try it in watercolor or soft pastels next, no reason I can't try multiple mediums either.

One thing that I've found improves my art is to do a series with the same subject. Try it in a different medium, change the mood or time of day, do it in different sizes, vary it enough that I don't get bored but keep working from the same reference until I have an interesting group of paintings that all share a common subject. This is a fun waterfall so I might come back to it again this week.

Enjoy! Just like yesterday, the link leads to the listing in my Etsy shop.