Winter Sunset, a new pastel landscape

I was on holiday recently and saw some postcards by a local artist, Barbara Curry, I was struck by the brillliant colours in the sunset which as you know if you follow this blog is one of my favourite subjects. I simply had to try and re-create this painting which was originally in oils. My medium is of course pastel. I bought a couple of Barbara's cards and have just found the time to use it as an exercise. I was quite pleased with the overall effect but maybe I should have given a little more thought to the mid-distance village.

WINTER SUNSET (pastel, A4 size) after Barbara Curry

One of the problems for an artist is that they must always be comparisons with the original. If you have browsed across to the link provided, you will no doubt be aware that although I have taken the specific painting as a reference and tried to re-create it, it is not as good as the original for several reasons. But I leave that up to your own analysis.

Presentation: Elements and Principles of Art, from Slideshare

I haven't managed to get much painting done recently so again the blog is suffering but I thought that this presentation from Slideshare was worth sharing.

Nothing new and to a regular artist not rocket science but it is neatly and effectively presented and serves as a great reminder.

Elements And Principles of Art from kpikuet

I have not yet fully explored this site, all sorts of presentations and I may come back on this one if it seems to have any "artistic" uses or merit. The site may be used by guests to view the presentations (powerpoint style?) but to upload you do need to register, it appears to be free with possible upgrades which are likely to need subscription.

65% Off Printed Canvasses - Two Days Only

Just received this notification from Zazzle and thought I would pass it on, if you have ever been tempted by by any of my paintings this could be your opportunity

Exclusive 2-Day Sale! 65% OFF All Wrapped Canvases  
USE CODE: CANVAS4WALLS

Check out my canvasses on my zazzle shop

I do have many other paintings on other stores which you can find easily from my profile page on Zazzle, using the above link as a first stop.

Even if you are not in the market for a stretched canvas print, there are many products (posters, cards, postcards, mugs, etc) which are all excellent quality. But you are allowed to just browse ...  
 

Painting a pastel landscape from a watercolour

I have been a little lazy recently in terms of my painting, and looking over some old watercolours decided to try one or two of them in pastel. Should be easy! However watercolour has features very different from pastel in many respects and the feeling of a watercolour could be difficult to achieve.

So I set myself this little challenge. Take a watercolour and repeat it in pastel to create a painting with the same feel.

This was the first painting I would try:-

This had always been a favourite of mine and I felt that for the puposes of this challenge it would be ideal. The earth colours gave it a very definite autumnal feel. Also, the light background spoke of mists and early morning.

The image I actually used as a reference for the pastel was actually cropped, I don't kbnow why, to remove some of the area from each side. But never mind, here is the pastel:-

Not quite as much detail, especially in the foreground, but nevertheless I am quite pleased with the outcome of this experiment. I am of a mind to do it again using the full sized original and concentrate more on the foreground but I will try one or two others before I do that.

I feel that the feeling of the original watercolour has been captured, success!

New Pastel Landscape Painting

I have been so busy lately that I have found it difficult to find time to paint. Fresh back from holiday in the Canary islands, I attended my art group tonight and came away with another painting, hope that you like it.

My colleagues saw this and though it had been painted using a dark/black paper. However, it is done on a white ground. I do create a background using dark colours before I start painting. I do this by layering several colours which I choose based on the effect I hope to achieve.

This painting was started with a covering of purple pastel, this was loosely rubbed in and fixed to avoid mixing with subsequent layers. the next layer was a dark blue. A less intense covering this time, but again rubbed in using the tips of my fingers and well fixed. A final background layer od black was then layed down.

Someone said, "why not use black paper?". The answer is that I find black paper too flat, I prefer the dark colour obtained by building up two or three layers.

In this case the black layer was not fixed and I painted the foliage into a soft black layer. There was some mixing but I kept it to a minimum and constantly wiped the pastel sticks used for the foliage to avoid any over mixing.

The final steps were to draw in the grey tree trunks, and add a shadow to the nearer trees; and then to add some linear marks to represent reeds, etc, by the bank of the water.

Reflections were added very simply by drawing down with the same colours used on the top part of the painting.

How many ways of painting the same scene.

Well of course there are an unmeasureable number of ways of painting essentially the same picture. Think of the haystacks or lillies of monet!

In my last post on this blog, I talked about a painter, Paul Bailey whose work I had come across on Facebook, I was inspired by some of his watercolours, and wanted to know if I could get the same sort of feel using soft pastels. The theme which particularly captured my attention was of trees on a hillside, sillouetted against a sky. Now, if you have been reading this blog, you will know I have used this theme a number of times previously but they were very different in their feel to those of this artist. For the last two weeks I have been experimenting at my weekly art group sessions to try and replicate the watercolours in artists' pastels.

I am not sure if I succeeded in my original aim but I am very pleased with the results and hope that you will enjoy them as well.

This painting was the first, I had given a little thought to the trees, mostly with respect to the colours I would use to obtain the sense of recession. But most of my attention was on how I would achieve the textures and intense colour which I wanted in the foreground.

I selected a palette of colours, I always tend to take the main colours out of my box and line them up ready for use. This saves scrabbling about searching for the next / right colour that I want to use and helps me to keep up a momentum once I start painting. No time to lose that inspiration!

I had decided that I would create a sloping hillside with a "valley" running through the centre and used a bright red colour (more than one in fact) to paint diagonal slopes to the nearest hillside. I used the sides of the pastel sticks with a light pressure to create a textured appearance on the black art paper. The further slopes were similarly painted with a less intense red and with the introduction of a purple colour, to give a feel of recession again. The dark blues used in the lower corners, I must admit, were a reflection of the reference painting that I was using and seemed to me to help contain the picture within the paper.

The sky was also very similar to the reference. A very light raw sienna along the hill tops gave the impression of a sunset (another favourite subject of mine). A light blue was used for the bulk of the sky with two (yes I know it should have been one or three) large massses to represent clouds.

I drew the trees still thinking about that recession I wanted to show, and did not realise until I had finished just how rigid and wooden (no pun intended) they were. I immediately started to think about the second painting in order to correct that, now, very obvious error -as I saw it.

Again I chose a palette of colours, in many ways very different to the previous choices.  But this time I was going to take a different approach to the hillside and I wanted to create an effect which could be called a sunrise. In the sky,I used a similar blue for an underpainting but used the light raw sienna to produce the effect of a glow from the lower centre of the sky.

The hillside was painted in black / dark browns which became my underpainting (BTW I call it this but it is just an initial layer which allows me to work on somethng other than white - or black in the case of this paper). I then lightly stroked in with reds and reddish browns and with shades of orange to create the feeling and appearance of rocks and undergrowth. In this painting, I must not have fixed the pastel marks properly, before completing the painting. It looks as if the LHS has become smudged. I gues I really should step away from my work now and then whilst it is in progress. I do get carried away!

But on the whole, I am quite satisfied with both paintings and think that I have learnt some valuable lessons.

I will include the next two in the series without actually saying much about them. In the next, I used many more colours in the foreground otherwise, I used lessons learnt from the first two paintings.

And for the last, a very quick (20 minutes before having to start clearing up) version of a simmilar scene with shadows on snow.

Although It looks simple, I did wowrk very quickly and the sky was actually painted in several layers. The snow needed to be toned down from the white of the paper and I chose a very light green-blue, you can juat see the texture in the on-screen image.

Because I did use several layers for the sky and found time to take a couple of photographs, I will be discussing my technique further in the next post - see you then?

Paul Bailey - Artist

I have been following this great artist on Facebook for a little while, painting in watercolour and acrylic he creates some wonderful art work. His facebook page also links to his own website and an Etsy shop.

this is a selection of paintings on sale in his Etsy shop:-

I love the free brushwork in his acrylics and the use of wet-into-wet techniques in his watercolours. I would have to select the watercolours as my favourites. Many of my favourites have a semi-abstract approach which as you will know if you follow my blog, is very much where I am coming from in my own paintings. If you are interested by this small selection, take a look at the etsy shop. The paintings are also very economically priced and worth consideration byh any potential collectors or just for that spot on the wall that you stare at all night.