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!

Fruit Studies in Charcoal and Pastel

 Charcoal pear studies 8 1/2" x 11"

My cold is starting to break up, so this morning I decided to sketch in something bold enough it'd be easy to get a photo. I love doing charcoal sketching. It's so easy to get good strong values and model the forms by sketching and smudging. I use a peel off the wrap charcoal pencil, so I don't have to bother sharpening it or getting charcoal stick on my fingers. When I feel like going to charcoal I want clean and easy.

Two pears, an apple and an orange

Pastel pencil on paper 8 1/2" x 11"

Still in the same plain sketchbook I got for a Christmas present, I got into color and sketched all the fruit I had left. I ate another pear, the big orange, the smaller apple and a banana. But didn't want to eat all of it before sketching, especially those quirky bumpy off-shape pears. The nice thing is that pear shapes don't need to be symmetrical. Real ones are lopsided, lumpy, bumpy and have strange hue shifts along their sides. They come in so many colors, sometimes all on the same pear from green to pinkish! 

Two Pears 9" x 12"

Rembrandt pastel on Bee Bogus Recycled Sketch Paper

After that, I decided to add one to my sketch wall. First loosely sketched in charcoal and then started using my Rembrandt half sticks. I layered them quite a it to get subtle color changes, especially between greens and earth reds and earth yellows with a touch of violet - yeah, most of it is complements. The shadow's been glazed over with a light violet but has a good five or six dark colors in it from gray and blue to brown and green and violet.

So today was a good day for playing around and most of all working large. For me anything 9" x 12" is big, when I'm used to using small journals or doing 6" square or 5" x 7" paintings.