Black Eyed Susans in soft pastel

Black Eyed Susans

9" x 12" pastel on paper

Good old workhorse Rembrandt pastels on Canson Mi-Tientes paper. This is my best Black Eyed Susans to date. These flowers confound me. I've done them many times and remember three frustrating oil paintings I did in Kansas where I got lost in background details but tilted all the flowers toward me. In my defense, the sun was at my back and they actually were all tilted toward the sun - but that doesn't really fly for artistic choices. They'd have been more interesting going in different directions and showing volume.

These three are more or less pointing in the same direction but at least they're at an angle giving them some depth!

Day 18 of 30 in 30 - Silver Tabby in a Garden

Silver Tabby in a Garden - 6" square

Painted earlier today! This is part of the Pastel Spotlight monthly challenge, photo reference by SweetHuia from WetCanvas.com. I meant to paint this cat sometime during the month. Today I felt good enough to do it!

Theme of the challenge is Line, so I did something tough - picked out the main subject with linear accents and added some lighter ones to the vegetation to unify that. I used very soft pastels for my early layers. Blue Earth for a local colors underpainting softly blended on light green Canson Mi-Tientes. Then went looser over that with Great American half sticks. No blending on that middle layer or layers, did several layers of color in some areas. 

Finally, when I knew hard pastels wouldn't give the effect I wanted, I tried Girault over the softer pastels. Girault are firm but in some ways act like very soft pastels. They lay down that easily with that much density from very fine-ground pigments, they're heavy in the hand from pigment-rich formula. They gave me good lines when the paper tooth was mostly full, so this worked in a big way. I'm happy with it and looking forward to more this month!

So far have gotten 18 of 18 posted on their proper day's blog at 30 Paintings in 30 Days. The weather's getting better and the landlord removed the radiator that turned my room sweltering whenever the temperature goes down a notch. It's bright and lovely, not sweating hot or bitter cold, I can relax today and maybe even get in two paintings, get ahead for once!

Bright Pear Reflecting

Bright Pear Reflecting

Pastel on paper, 5" x 7"

A few days ago, I got a lovely set of 15 Caran d'Ache Soft Pastels, a wonderful assortment for a Colourist with bright saturated colors in warm and cool, plus my favorite three earths - yellow ochre, reddish earth and dark brown, black and white. It's a perfect small range. I also finally after literally decades of wanting to do so, bought the full range of Canson Mi Tientes colors in full sheets.

The first time I wanted ot stock that paper in all its colors at home, I was a teenager and it cost too much. For all those years and decades, I bought a sheet or two at a time. Or a dozen sheets a week sometimes when I did portraits in New Orleans, often trying out a new color or two.

I've spent far more on other supplies, watercolors, great brushes, pastels and colored pencils sets. The whole stack cost me less than $80... so my putting it off was rather silly. Now it feels as if I have the whole art store at hand. 

The color I used today is "Oyster." It's also in the basic pad which has been a lot of how I got my Mi-Tientes over the years, convenient size at 9" x 12" and easy to cut those sheets in half for smaller works. I'll be cutting down the big sheets the way I did in New Orleans on a good day, then store them sealed in a plastic tub to avoid attracting bugs. That big a paper stock can easily be bug damaged or water damaged. I may do the same to the big watercolor paper sheets in there and lightly pencil brand on them. Especially the tinted Bockingford sheets.

Last, this evening when I was done, I tried out my new Pentel Pocket Brush pen. It's surprisingly great! I read about it on Gurney's Journey and had to have one. As mentioned, it takes a little learning curve to control the very fine tip, but is wonderfully responsive. Some sloppy sketches before this and then this Ari gesture since he looked up at me squinting with his eyes nearly shut, just, face turned up and ears interested.

Ari Cat from life

8 1/2" x 4" Pentel Pocket Brush Pen on paper

Love the responsiveness of the pen and the very fine lines it can get. Practice will improve these but I'm very happy with this cat gesture!

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.

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.

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.

Holiday Ornaments day 26 for 30 in 30 Challenge

Holiday Ornaments

6" square

Pastels on paper

Had a little trouble with the photo on this one, the silver ornament came through pinkish when I got the gold to look right and I don't think the metallic effects show very well. The ornaments are in metallic Henri Roche' pastels while the green velvet backdrop is in Rembrandt and Unison pastels. 

Another page in my pastel journal and another experiment with Roche' metallic pastels. I'll be reviewing these soon, want one more experiment on sanded pastel paper before I post about them.