Stormy Skyscape

Stormy Skyscape

7 1/2" x 9 1/2" pastel on paper, 

stormy sky above low hills, row of pines, wind-tossed lake

This painting took me two months to create from start to finish. Intended to become a demo, I'll sort the images and post it on Rob's Art Lessons in afew days. Right now I just finished after a long day and I'm so glad it's done!

Pastels used: Cretacolor Pastels Carre' for underpainting, then 120 Unison half sticks for nuances in cloud values in muted colors, a few final details on land with Caran d'Ache Soft Pastels including my signature.

I love that sky and want to do more cloudy sky scenes! I had so many ideas for it that I finally quit fiddling and moving the clouds around. I can just paint more cloudy skies after all!

Two Spring Irises in Pastel

Two Spring Irises

Pastel on sanded paper

It's taken me almost a week, maybe more than a week to do this painting in three sessions. I sketched it loosely in Holbein pastels, mostly with side strokes. Some spotting on the paper meant I did have to layer heavily or I might have added last details to the first loose light expressive rendering. I liked it a lot. But my second layer developing it became tight and dull, it lacked texture and the flowers lost their graceful shape.

Took me days of sketching other things and staring at it on the wall to figure out what to do next. That even involved erasing a bunch of leaves and a stem, working over what I had with softer pastels and adding both lighter and darker tones to the flowers because I had those tones in the larger Great American set of 60 half sticks. I had the right greens in the softer set including a dark olive. It worked once I used the right pastels.

I might have made it work with the Holbeins and their limited palette but only if I'd really erased out everything and been willing to settle for some hue substitutions I didn't like.

Fruit from Life

Fruits from Life

9" x 12" pastel on paper

I have another pastel in progress and some loose sketches on white, but this came about because I just stacked that pear ontop of some other fruits. I loved how it looked and decided to pant them. The light over there is very strong from the window and they just attracted me.

Soon I'll finish up the irises I started, but don't want to post the stages until I know I'll finish. I'm disappointed at an intermediate stage. Might brush off the background or soften it as I work it over.

Flowering Trees, pastel

 Flowering Trees

5" x 7" pastel on sanded paper

I started this yesterday on the second sample piece of Pastel Premier paper that Dakota Pastels sent me. I'm not sure why I took so long to do anything with the X-Fine white piece when the Medium grit Italian Clay piece was so satisfying. I was a little put off by the extra fine grit, didn't think it'd hold much pastel.

Oh was I wrong about that! The superfine grit held a lot of layers. I had to mix colors on this little darling because I was working with a 36 color set of Holbein half sticks, not my usual big selection with a deep dark violet available! 

I can also happily report that Pastel Premier responds very well to a watercolor underpainting or water wash. I'd heard it becomes a bit sticky with rubbing alcohol 70% wash so I went for watercolor. Wow. It performed beautiful. Here's my tonal underpainting in Winsor & Newton Artist watercolor (vintage pan set from 1998 or so, when they recently changed the name to Professional.)

Flowering Trees

tonal underpainting in red-violet watercolor

I like how the underpainting looks too. t came out well. I made a few changes, mostly hose two shadows on the left looked cloned so I pushed one back and connected it across the painting while making the forward one a bit larger. There's enough layers of bushes showing to give a little depth.

I had fun with this, a spring painting to celebrate the return of my body functioning again! I'm starting to have good days so I'll hopefully paint and post more now as we go toward summer!

Speaking of which, last Wednesday I forgot to post the two pen and ink with watercolor pieces I did while I was out at the clinic garden getting rose photos and lots of spring flower photos too.

 African Tree from Video

ATC size 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" pen and watercolor on paper

Started out in the morning watching yet another nature documentary and fell in love with this classic African tree from a big panoramic scene. So sketched it from life after a couple of rewinds. Fast little pencil gesture, inked and then tested the Borden & Riley 90lb drawing pad for light washes. It curled a little but didn't soak through and flattened again just fine leaving the pad upside down overnight, didn't even need to weight it. Fun little pads, pity Blick doesn't carry them any more. Wish I'd stocked up on them when they were available.

San Francisco Street View from Life

This is actually a view from outside my front door looking toward the left. There's a bright mural across the street enclosing a closed storefront that used to be a Kwik Print or something like that, then these trees in a row on my side of the street. I didn't put people into it this time, the street was fairly quiet and I was rushing to get the pencil done before the Paratransit van came.

Once I got on the van I inked it, doing squiggly and rough lines in motion and straighter clean ones at stops. Later on in the waiting room I did the washes. But the basics of the scene are still from life, it doesn't matter when I ink and color something like this.

It was fun. It feels good to be able to sketch from life. Most of my life I wasn't good enough at it to capture the scene so got very frustrated and only sketched a detail or two, now I sketch better and can detail at will. Put in the pigeon from memory, they are always around and I like them.

Wildflower Scene with Stages

 Wildflower Scene 

5" x 7" on Uart 400 Sanded Pastel Paper

Today I did something a lot like a painting lesson. It was an experiment in several ways. Would the palette of Terry Ludwig's 14 Best Loved Basics be a good landscape palette to do a scene with hills, trees, a wildflower meadow and a beautiful blue sky? I'm happy to say yes, the results are above!

And I took some progress photos to show how I did it.

 Stage 1 Alcohol Wash In Progress

I tried something I've seen in several videos and blogs by serious pastelists. An alcohol wash like the ones Karen Margulis uses. I've long admired her results and she's a mad expert for painting wildflower meadows. Mine's just a crude attempt in her direction, she is much more concise and has the practice to say in two strokes what takes me six.

From what I saw in her examples, it doesn't take much pastel on the paper to do an alcohol wash. The alcohol should be 70% Rubbing Alcohol, the kind you get at a drugstore. Not the drinking kind even if some artists use vodka. Put the vodka in the artist and the rubbing alcohol swished on the painting with as big a brush as you've got. If you can't tell the difference, stop drinking. Do not store these in unlabeled containers for that reason.

Just swish the liquid around over the pastels within the area to be washed that color. Really don't worry about edges. I was too careful here and treated it more like a coloring book but I wanted to keep the rough abstract shapes of my bands. Karen would've slopped it on and let it drip mingling some colors for cool effects down in the meadow. That's practice for you. This is my first go. It actually will still work done this way.

 Alcohol Wash Complete

Here's how it looks with the wash in all over the painting. Now I'm not using plain beige paper anywhere. The color has gone deep into the crevices of the paper and maybe soaked in between the sand grains. It's not going anywhere. Any flecks of paper that show between my strokes or in a broken color passage will be the color of the underpainting.

The trees band is brown and the meadow band pink because these warm colors will make the green sticks in my Ludwig set pop and look greener. Since those three greens are nearly brown, I thought that was seriously important to try to give an impression the forest wasn't dead yet.

Background areas done.

Work back to front, which in a landscape like this is top to bottom. I painted the sky first and forgot to take a photo of just the sky in. There are three shades of blue in the set plus a very pale yellow nearly white. I used all four of those colors to gradate the sky. I could have blended it more to give a smooth gradation but I liked that look as if wispy clouds were blowing up in the distance.

The hills were mostly the light and medium dusty violet in the set with a bit of sky blue in the shadows to lighten and harmonize the darker violet. 

The trees I used all three greens, the gold stick and the deep dark violet. Yay for the deep dark violet in the darkest shadows at bases of trees. It helps define them. They are too small and too far away for me to put in trunks and branches but in a larger painting I might have brought some trees and bushes forward into the meadow band too to help give scale and those might get shadows and trunks.

Here's the finish again so you can see the meadow up close:

Finished painting

I did not pick out any grass blades or weeds with leaves. Most of that area I just used blocky vertical strokes with the ends of the pastels, the shorter side. I put a little green in over the gold and a touch of brown then started adding flower passages with the corners of the flower colors. At the end I added some white and blue flowers. I deliberately scumbled over the distant ones with the pale violet to push the middle ground back into the distance and cut down into the meadow area with the forest colors again. Then signed it.

A cool little experiment that worked. I might try this again with a good photo reference and see what I get, since I still have the other piece of Uart 400 to play with. Small paintings like this are fun to use to try different things, you can always try again if there's something about it you don't like!

Day 30 Ari Cat from Life

Ari Cat from Life

7" square pastels on Stillman & Birn Beta journal

Fini! The very last painting for my 30 paintings in 30 days challenge. I thought I'd do something square, bold and colorful. Instead I did something square, soft, tonal and muted. My cat sat in that pose for all of about five or ten seconds. It's usually a prelude to his laying down. I stared at him for the entire time and then sketched fast in charcoal when he moved. So there he is! Fluffy tail and all. I loved what he did with his tail, that little J shape on the ground thing is so cool.

Yeah, well, I love my cat. The carpet really is a vaguely pinkish neutral. The walls allegedly white are faded and stained from years since they were painted, the light in here is yellowish and the door does have those panels on it. He wasn't sitting by the door but he often does, so I simplified the background by not putting in my walker and computer cords and piles of art supplies on the floor where he'd really been sitting. I wanted the wall behind him for definition. Easy matter to look over at the corner by the door for that too.

I will be doing two more pieces today, at least sketches, because I got tagged on Facebook for 3 artworks a day for 5 days challenge by Tammy Gustafson-Vanderbur. I doubted I could manage three a day that long, but she and Dani Day both pointed out I could post older art if I wanted to. So there's a backup plan.

Me, I'm actually taking the challenge to new pieces so that these next five days I do more sketching. I consider it counts even if they are all on the same page. My cat will feature strongly in them, I'm sure.

Well, here's the other two for today, in order!

Pear Study, 6" square pastel on paper

I did this one in the full Colourist style on rough brown sketch paper, loved the way it came out. Played with colors in the background too, shading both hue and value from left to right, top to bottom.

Then after finishing that one, I decided what the heck. I'll do one with a gold background. I love those Metallic Pan Pastels, why not actually set off a colorful subject with them?

Orange On Gold

6" square pastels and Pan Pastels on brown rough paper.

This one I used the Terry Ludwig Sunset set of 14 and also the 14 Best Loved Basics since I needed some browns and darks and other hues to go with the pure bright yellows, oranges and reds. I came very close to the true colors of this bright orange that way, it is searing and gorgeous!

I ate both pears, the little green one from the previous Three Fruits painting and the big green one from today. They were great. Tasted even better for having been painted first!

Day 29 Rainbow Lorikeet

Rainbow Lorikeet 6" square

Rembrandt pastels on Uart 400 sanded pastel paper

Photo reference from WetCanvas.com Reference Image Library by RubyRedDog2, This bird was one of two photographed in a zoo but I was familiar with Rainbow Lorikeets from some photos years ago by a friend in Australia. I loved those birds. They are insanely colored and very friendly, even wild ones become semi-tame when fed as she used to feed them corn off her back porch. An entire wild flock of them came out for her when she brought them food. Some birds are just sociable like that.

I've seen one photo of an Australian bloke with about nine or ten of them perching on him all friendly, they're really good natured and sweet as your normal little pet budgerigars. I had a budgie as a kid but the Rainbow Lorikeets are even brighter. The little green budgies are almost camouflaged in a tropical forest but these flying jewels are easy to see by any creature that likes fruits and flowers. Gorgeous birds. Can't keep a bird now because my cat is afraid of birds, but I do have some fond memories.

Ari got beaten up by a sparrow when he was only two years old. He didn't realize he was a natural predator to sparrows. The hysterical sparrow did, it landed right in front of him on a shelf in the closet without seeing him. Looked up, spazzed out and flew right up at him beating his poor nose with its wings in dire peril for its life. Ari kept leaning back farther and farther, eyes wide with terror vaguely waving a paw at this mad homicidal flying thing, then made himself all round and fluffed up when it gained enough altitude to bolt out of there.

My daughter, whose cat skills far outstrip my poor indoor cat's, caught the sparrow gently with a scarf and brought it to the open kitchen window to let it out. Poor Ari went off bird watching for months, but finally came to understand that the dangerous creatures can't get through a solid window. So he likes bird watching again but will not go near one without a barrier!

He'll catch mice, but birds are right out of it. None of them are food anyway, food comes in crunchy pellets in bags and I bring it to him. He likes proper cat food, city cats' food, the good low-grain kind. Even wet food is too close to human food for his tastes. As an urban cat with a job taking care of his human, he expects urban services like food processing and the delivery of choice morsels in shiny bags. Gets excited on new-bag day and knows who it's for, but hunting for himself is not something he's ever considered. He's a well paid professional therapy cat and that's how he likes it. Weather doesn't appeal to him either. Climate control and food delivery is a cat's natural habitat, with cushions and things to claw and catnip carrots.

Did a second sketch for the day using Pan Pastels Colorless Blender on most of the page under the sky to see if it'd lighten the colors I put over it. It did beautifully, I had to layer a couple more times to get the darks in. The bottom where the land is didn't get that treatment for comparison.

Storm Sketch, pan pastels on paper

8 1/2" x 11"

The colorless blender is another useful tool. I'm glad it was included in my set of mediums, now that I know what I can do with it. What it didn't do was lighten it right off the sponge if I dabbed in the medium then the color. It will spread out color more than just letting it wear off the sponge and putting it under an area will dilute color going into it to make a soft blended effect.

Day 27 Heavy Metal Pear

Heavy Metal Pear 6" square

Henri Roche' pastels on Uart 400 sanded paper

No photo reference for this, only the weird shaped little green pear that already got featured in Three Fruits sitting on a black surface that I jazzed up with colors because I could. It wound up having an abstract look and a strong triad color harmony, odd because I never do triad color harmony but this time I like it. The pear really shines. I meant it to look matte rather than shiny, using metallic pastels was a way to give it a particular look that worked well. 

Of course being metallic it also reflects whatever's in front of it. This time I was wearing black so I didn't get that pinkish look on the silver like on Silver Fish. Red or orange shirts do strange things with metallic colors! Or even white, it's a lot of fun for me to wear that orange shirt and come close to a white on white composition in cold daylight where all the shadows are a clear violet cast blue. Ideas for another time.

I'm happy with today's painting and happier still that the 30 in 30 Challenge has helped me get back into daily painting. I might be using watercolour markers for half of them but I'm also sketching more too and sometimes the daily painting isn't the only thing I do in a day. Much thanks to Leslie Saeta for the challenge!

I'll be trying to keep on with daily art during February, weather permitting.