Lock House Reflection, 16 x 12, UART 400

This is a very different picture from what  I normally do!  It’s in the woods and most of the values are in the mid range. But I loved the way the building and it’s reflection created a rather ghostly image amid the trees and water of mid-March.  I will admit that I upped the saturation a bit when printing the color photo in order to get the color of the water and ANY color!  I didn’t use a black and white photo for this, as I felt it would look like nothing! The subject is a small building near Wide Water and Old Angler’s Inn, on the C&O Canal. The upper woodland path shows just to the left of the building.

I wasn’t sure how to begin this picture, so I decided to just lay in colors. I’m including the underpainting before I added any alcohol to it, so you can see how it looked (pretty awful actually!!!)  (This is one of the Dakota-mounted boards and I find they have a definite texture to them that makes it hard to smoothly lay in the pastel. Any one else notice this?) The alcohol helped, of course. But the applications of water had to be finger-blended to provide the smooth surface of the water. I added some more turquoise pastel after blending. I was also concerned about this being isolated color and I added various values of blues and blue greens to other places in the water, rocks, and the windows of the building. This is not a subject I’ll probably pursue, but it was fun to challenge myself.

Initial underpainting of hard pastel