Spring Walk in Kew, 16″ x 20″, UART 400

First application of pastel over graphite drawing

Painting after application of workable fixative

Being snowed in, you never know what will happen!  John’s been going through old photos and came upon a stack of 4 x 6’s from our March 2005 trip to London.  One of the pictures is of me walking in Kew Gardens with hanging willows.  I really liked the picture and decided it would give me something different to do. There are many “different” things about this picture. First, of course, it has a figure, something I rarely include. Second, there is no wet underpainting.  And third, I got out pastels I haven’t used in a long time, such as Holbeins and Dailer-Rowneys.  Most of my hard pastels are in my public studio, but I wanted to work on UART.  So I decided to do a dry “underpainting” or at least to just begin directly with the harder pastels that I had and then spray it with workable fixative.  I discussed this form of painting in my Wednesday class last week. It’s something I don’t normally do because I won’t use the fixative at Washington ArtWorks.  But here I can open the doors and stick the painting out over the snow (trying to avoid the drips from the icicles!) and spray away.  Kind of stinky afterwards but it was a good time for a lunch break.

In addition to using different pastels, I used a rubber tip blender to smooth out some of the areas and get rid of the light specks, particularly in the lower left and right.  I used a lot of colors in the tree but I’m not sure how well it’s showing.  It was an overcast day but there was light on the left side of the figure, so I added warm colors to the left side of the branches.  The sky was done with two colors of very light Daler-Rowney, a violet and a cream. I bought a set of neutrals many years ago after they changed their format and I’ve hardly used them. They were quite soft on the UART, but I think of them as being a medium hard pastel, like Rembrandt.

This isn’t a great painting, (the figure and bush are too close in size, for one thing) but it was fun playing with different materials and techniques and remembering a visit that was 11 years ago. And, in the meantime, the plow came and our little court is now plowed and my new Subaru is ready and waiting to deal with the snow! Hoping that the Wed. class can go ahead.