January Pastels
Evening Time to Get Away...
9" x 6"
Richeson medium-hard pastels
Aquabee Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch Paper
Photo reference by Paula Ford for WetCanvas.com January 2011 Pastel Spotlight.
I seem to be falling into a habit of daily pastel sketching. I like the Bogus paper and I'm trying out different pastels on it. This set, the 120 color Richeson hard pastels, is inexpensive and high quality but lacking in light colors. It has beautiful dark and medium value colors across the spectrum including some great violets. So this morning I got out the box and looked at it.
I'd been avoiding those pastels. They came jumbled up, not in chromatic order. The box is inconveniently large and the sticks are very long. I got frustrated at the lack of light colors and trying to find the color I wanted when they were all scattered randomly throughout. So today I sorted them and as I put each stick away in chromatic order, broke off a piece a third to a half of the stick so that I can use the smaller piece on its side. Very generous pastels, a good bargain.
Once it was organized I realized it was a beautiful palette for nocturnes. So I did this painting. I'll be doing some more nocturnes for the Pastel Spotlight as the month continues. With each new landscape I'm working on internalizing and applying the principles I learned in Johannes Vloothuis Landscape Class.
Johannes has a website: http://www.cyberartlearning.com - he is doing video demonstrations on Sundays at 3PM Eastern time (2PM my time, Central time.) You can navigate to them by just clicking on the TV icon on his site. There's also a lively chat next to the video screen.
Paula Ford posted nine references for this month's Pastel Spotlight with a challenge to try the ones that are hardest for you. Six are landscapes including a seascape and a nocturne. One is a street with buildings. One is the black and white photo of the vintage girl that I already posted here. The last is a toddler in a snowsuit. I've now done three of them.
The toddler wouldn't be any harder than doing the girl from the black and white photo was, so I can't really think of him as the challenge. It's more that if I did him I wouldn't feel like hanging it on my wall - he's not my grandkid, not anyone I know and I like cats more than babies when it's in general. I'd probably morph him into a cat in a snowsuit and that'd just be cruel.
Part of my challenge will be to do some of the references more than once. I definitely want to do the seascape more than once, it came out beautiful but I want more realism in at least one of my versions. I'd also like to do a panoramic one. Others I'll try to change the time of day or use different pastels or surfaces. So this month's all about pasteling and I'm having fun with it.