House at Mosquito Cove, 16 x 12, Pastelbord

This painting was done as a demonstration for my Tuesday class. When I do a demo that has a complicated composition, I like to have it set into the paper or board before I do the demo. I find that using charcoal and water works really nicely for this. I had problems getting the house reflection aligned and changed it a number of times by just adding water and wiping off with a paper towel. The resulting wash gives me a good road map for my painting and doesn’t mix with the subsequent layers of pastel.  For this painting, I used  hard pastels to do an underpainting, then added soft pastel over. I’ve made a number of changes since the demo, such as warming up the colors in the background and removing distracting flowers from the foreground. One of the challenges was the division of space between the houses, water, and land at bottom. The reflections coming down and the reeds going up, hopefully, tie it all together.