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.

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Sketchbook Mobile App

I bought this app for my iPhone back when I first moved here and played with it a bit, got quite a few images done. But I forget its iconic commands fast if I don't use it for a while and once I got it onto my Kindle Fire with its larger screen making digital sketching easier, I could not fumble through getting the images saved and exported in a way I could offload them to my computer.

Tonight I figured it out. Today was a miserable sick day. I didn't do 3 in 5 with new art, just posted the three pieces I had up in the Vantage Points exhibition at Openhouse that were so inspiring to me. They really are my current best anyway. But just when I thought I wouldn't get anything in, not so much as a cat sketch, I decided to have a go one more time with Sketchbook Mobile.

Now that I can do more with the images than just store them on the Kindle and maybe lose them if I have to go back to factory settings, I'm more likely to keep playing with it and experimenting. I bought a Sensu Brush on sale from Dick Blick a couple of months ago and hadn't really tried it. That's the next experiment, that and finding the right brush tool that works with it for a gouache-like effect.

Monochrome Blue Skyscape

Monochrome Blue Skyscape

Winsor & Newton Watercolour Marker, Prussian Blue Hue

Stillman & Birn Zeta journal 7" square

The other half of this month's new art supplies arrived and so I could not resist at least getting in a test sketch. These markers are everything I hoped they'd be - artist grade watercolor in a marker form for quick sketching and underpainting. Watersoluble, they can be pulled out into midtones and light values with a wet brush or in this case a waterbrush for fast pen and wash studies.

So I goofed around with a familiar subject, imaginary clouds and ways of rendering them in pen. It worked. The loose lines and soft washes worked together and the Prussian Blue Hue has such a great long value range that I'll have no trouble getting darks either in watercolor painting or pen-wash or underpainting pastel field sketches.

I'll be reviewing the Travel Set in my Art Supplies Review blog soon, watch for more details about the product and how it handles. I may do some more tests but as an example sketch, this really worked! I did something I've wanted to do in pen-wash for the longest time - got the sky gradient in, even if exaggerated!

Clouds Coming In, Underpainting

Clouds Coming In...

Underpainting

hard pastel on paper

Today I mostly planned this painting, from a photo in the WetCanvas Reference Image Library. I wanted to do another strong cloudscape, but the photo has other interesting features like that reflecting water. So I'm not sure where this is going, but I'll find out when I get there. To some extent I'm about to abandon the photo in favor of letting the painting find its way.

I used red earths under all the foliage and brush because the greens are richer with a ruddy underpainting, but used blue under the sky and water to make that vivid. I might lighten the sky some when I go back with softer pastels to create the entire scene. I might also simplify it some, though it seems to lead toward the center on the land with those pools of water. It's a little complex for something that small but I'll see what it becomes when I go back to it tomorrow. If I don't like something I can always paint it out.

Pastels are opaque and hard pastels erase easily, right back to bare paper. I'll see how this goes.

Sunset II

Sunset II

pastel on paper, 5" x 7"

Started early today so I might add more later on. I liked the sunset reference I used for the Pearlescent Pan Pastels dawn, so I used it again. It's by DAK723 posted for the October 2014 Pastel Spotlight challenge, which has a theme of Orange. Don's been doing color themes for a while, the only two left are red and violet, wonder what he'll come up with for them? Of course he could also do white, black, gray, brown as themes. I'll just have to see.

One of the things that intrigued me was the frosty field with its clumps of weeds and the lavender field, which I think is actual lavender. It was in the reference and I included it in both paintings but it's more obvious here. I think I managed to get the feel of the frost in this one. I also loved the receding trees and their numerous sky holes, something I succeeded in capturing this time.

Pastel Life Sketch Apple and Containers

Pastel Life Sketch Apple and Containers

7" x 5"

Rembrandt pastels on black Crescent rag mat

Odd little sketch of some things on top of my black refrigerator, using a 60 color Rembrandt half sticks set I just bought a couple of weeks ago. I've actually been back to "daily art, at least a gesture sketch" for a month or two now, barring sick days. August missed only four days. But rather than work back, I'll start posting forward again to share my artistic journey.

Sorry I didn't post anything much so far from 2014! I had several good ones so far this summer so I'll add them as highlights...

Open Road

8" square

Assorted soft pastels on Uart sanded pastel paper

Photo reference by DAK723 on WetCanvas.com

Did the above for a pastel forum challenge with a "Green" theme. Had fun with the clouds, it was a good breakthrough on clouds painting as well as landscapes.

Colourful Lemons

7" x 5"

Unison Pastels on sanded pastel paper

Another pastel challenge from a photo in the Reference Image Library at WetCanvas, a lot of us did these lemons. Best "colourist" painting I had done to date at the time for a "Yellow" challenge. Also in the same challenge, another yellow fruit...

Colourful Bananas

7" x 5"

Unison pastels on sanded pastel paper

Photo reference from WetCanvas June 2014 Pastel Spotlight

This one didn't reproduce as well as the lemons. It was hard to get the reds, greens and yellows all to come through even close to the original so that blue shadow is actually a blue green closer to the green of the leaf. There's more hue and value variation in the bananas than shows but they're smooth gradients. Achieved a fine detailed rendering with quite soft pastels on this.

And more recently, this month's challenge is "Blue." So another photo by DAK723, of a lake scene with clouds, changed quite a bit in the painting:

Lake Scene

8" x 10"

Assorted pastels on Uart sanded pastel paper

I had a lot of fun playing with textures and values on this, also using different textures of pastels at different stages. The blues in the water do not quite go as far toward violet in the painting as they do in the photo, it's actually more Ultramarine values and some mid-blues and greener blues. But cameras lie about color all the time and the photo makes me think it might be fun to carry it all the way to violet on one sometime!

Anyway, there's some high points of 2014 and I expect to post more often again. Some days might be no more than a quick pen gesture of my cat or a still life object, others may have stages of a painting. I'll try to get back in the habit of posting when I've done something. There are still days I don't have even a gesture to show for it due to chronic disease symptoms but I hope to build up to where I can manage at least that every day. My habit is returning!

Storm over the Hills

Storm over the Hills, 8" x 10" Pan Pastels on light gray Strathmore Artagain pastel paper.

Yesterday's bright colorful sunset began as a storm sweeping across the land. I liked the way the orange paper set off the clouds and hills so I let the painting evolve into a sunset. I like it, it's cheery and warm. Today's is dark and dramatic. I used a reference from Johannes Vloothuis, in the General section of his Reference Photos pack (available from North Light Shop).

So this painting is tighter and more detailed. I deliberately split the area of the painting 1/3 land, 2/3 sky to keep it in my skyscape series but moved landscape elements and changed their relation to each other.

I bought the Artagain pad in curiosity to see how well it compared with Canson Mi-Tientes, my usual pastel paper. I love the colors - they all have flecks of darker fibers in them for a beautiful look. The biggest difference is that the surface is smooth, almost slick. I think the smooth side of Mi-Tientes is softer but the Artagain holds color just as well so it's toothier than it felt. Definitely a good non sanded pastel paper, available in pads or in full sheets.

I used my 10 color Painters Set again, but also used the colors in the 5 Tints set and 5 Deep Dark Shades set. I've mentioned those are the most convenient of the convenience colors - three primary and two secondary colors each in tints and deep dark shades. It's pretty easy to blend a deep dark shade with the pure tone to get the original Shades, easier than judging exactly how much black to use to darken an area. I could have done this entirely with the Painters, but found I was right about the convenience tints and deep darks.

Because I bought an extra 10 color tray by mistake it was easy to pull just those colors from my full range set and keep them handy too. So I've now got the short stack of small trays nearby for a whole series of Pan Pastel cloudscapes. Each one should have a very different mood and feeling.

Sunset Cloudscape

Sunset Cloudscape, 8" x 10" in Pan Pastels on orange Canson Mi-Tientes pastel paper. I used the smooth side, definitely didn't want to wrestle with the weave texture on this skyscape.

Once again I used just the 10 color Painters Set. I'm getting some practice in with the limited palette so that I can prepare to bring it with me when I go out to paint plein air. I'll be doing various paintings just using those 10 Painters colors until I'm completely used to mixing my tints and any hues not included in them. So far I'm very happy with the results - and happy with how small the 10 color tray is. It's reduced the sheer amount of stuff stacked up next to my chair. Nothing needs to be moved around when I use the small set.

This one is completely from imagination. I set out to create abstract shapes in the clouds, highlight around them and play with their shapes and colors. As I developed the cloud shapes, I decided I liked the orange color of the paper and brightened it with a sunset gradient. The net result is a lot of fun, very dramatic, expressive, colorful sunset that brings together the memories of thousands of blazing sunsets I couldn't paint at the time I sat watching them. Fat puffy cumulus clouds always fascinated me anyway, so this painting is an exploration of those shapes among other things, as well as the values and hues that shift and play within them.

It started out to become a storm and then turned into a sunset. Sometimes it's fun to just see where the painting is going and change my idea as it gets there.