I have just completed doing three demos for my Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday classes.  This demo was done for the Sunday class.  All of them are from photos that I took last Friday morning in Boyds, Maryland, early in the morning. We had snow on Wed. and it was gone in Rockville, but I knew there was more further west. It was foggy when I got up but I knew the sun was coming out and decided this might  prove to be great for pictures. It was!  This first one is of corn fields with distant fog and a cloud bank overhead with light below.  The composition is close to that in the picture, but I didn’t like the corn stalks going straight across the bottom. So I broke them off so as to have some area of just snow, in differing colors of close value. I also widened the area of fields in the middle, because I thought that was more interesting. I used a very light touch on the paper and let some of it show through to suggest rows of corn stalks. I thought it worked pretty nicely!  In the sky, I used primarly Giraults, but then added a pinkish Mt. Vision color to indicate the lighted clouds and really liked that. I smoothed it out with a Girault. The distant trees are much more violet than the photo, which is farily dull. I did this demo after giving short lectures on composition and the use of color characteristics to provide dominance, contrast, and nuance.  The dominant hue is blue violet, the dominant values are in the mid range; the temperature is cool and the choma is pretty grayed.  The contrast is in the light of the sky, and there is lots of nuance!  Will share the other two in the coming days.

Reference photo

Emerging Light, 16 x 12, pastel premiere “Italiian clay”