Reference photo

September Light, Rockville, pastel premiere Italian clay, 12″ x 16″

I began teaching this week and have done two demonstrations that I will share with you in different posts.  Both were examples of “direct application of pastel on a toned surface” (as opposed to doing a wet underpainting).  Both were done on Pastel Premiere “Italian clay”, like the painting I did in August of the sunlit field.

I am including the photographic reference so you can see the difference in the house!  I really didn’t like the house in the picture (too much like Rockville), so I substituted a simple house (more like New England).  My other change was at the bottom. Instead of a driveway, I made it lawn, and then brought the bush down to the bottom of the picture. I liked this composition much better.

I began by blocking out the darks using a Ludwig “eggplant” and the first thing I noticed was how much of it was falling off the paper!  This paper really doesn’t accept pastel very well, unless its really soft.  So I got into the soft pastels fairly soon and I think you can see that in the types of strokes.

Our focus this fall is on light and this picture is about the dramatic affect of the light coming from behind the house and to it’s right and streaming across the bush in foreground.  My first I used yellow greens and oranges to paint the trees nearest the sunlit sky.  My first thought was to use deep reds for the darks (because of the bush), but because I wasn’t doing a wet underpainting, I chose violet–always safer!  And for the house I used a mixture of violets and cool greens.

I tried to keep this painting loose and painterly, but I am not very happy with the flowered bush, which was one of the things I really liked in the photo. I think it is over done, and I’m tempted to brush it off and start over again!  What do you think?