Road Through the Cornfields, 16 x 12, Pastelbord

It’s snowing like crazy here!  I’ve cancelled my Monday class and am looking out at winter wonderland–not really what I want the week before Easter!  I’ve just spent time finishing off last week’s painting.  When I worked on it last Monday I only had a black and white photo.  I began with a charcoal wash and liked the way the trees developed. I then did an underpainting with hard pastel using some really wild color–bright yellow green  in the sky! I worked with the soft pastels fairly intuitively, knowing this is a scene from autumn on the Maryland Eastern shore. But there were some problems–the main one being that the sky and the leaves were the same value, as were the road and the neighboring grass. So it was very hard to determine where each should be!  I did my best, but this morning I worked with the color photo. I really liked the shape of the sky holes in the trees and I was losing a lot of that with the B & W photo. In the photo, the background trees are all green and the foreground foliage is orange. I didn’t change that, trying to be faithful to my intuitive color. But I did carve out more sky pieces and worked on the color of the road.