Pines by River (what I did all month!)
Pines by River
8" square
Color Conte hard pastels
Light Grey ClaireFontaine PastelMat coated pastel card
Photo reference by DAK723 from WetCanvas.com for the Feb. 2010 "Pastel Spotlight" challenge in Soft Pastel Talk forum.
This is what I was working on throughout February between doing notans from the reference, value studies, color studies, tree studies from the same reference and then those gaudy preliminary layers. Here's how it looks with all three stages next to each other. I didn't scan after Stage Three because I did stages three and four pretty much together across the whole thing.
Colorix made this three-stage composite for me and it really shows the difference between the early stages and the finished painting. I used more non-green colors and nonintuitive colors in the foliage this time than usual and it really helped. Also the clouds are not just flat white -- even the highlights are actually a very pale near-white cream.