The Last Song, 12 x 16, UART 500

I think I’m on a western kick. I found this photo from Washington State that I tried to paint several years ago. It was a disaster!  I went into the reds too soon and I didn’t like it at all.  So I decided to try it again, sneaking up on the reds!  I did a lot of drawing and didn’t want to lose my lines. So I decided to do a partial underpainting using hard pastel but no wash. I used complementary color, putting greens under the red and dark reds under the greens. Then, because there were lots of little light pieces of paper showing through, I mooshed it all with my hands!  I then sprayed it with workable fixative. I used direct application of soft pastel for the sky and background mountains, then added various reds and oranges to the building, letting little pieces of green show through. The foreground is all Girault greens.  This was a much more successful painting than the first one. It’s my second use of the UART 500, using a very different technique. But I like the surface very much. Here is the underpainting.  I find that it’s a lot of fun looking at a photo and thinking about the possibilities of how to make it work and, since writing the book, I now have a much better sense of what these possibilities are!

Partial dry underpainting