Spring 2015 Pastel Class Week 1

Pastel: Garden Fantasy Week 1

I am working on a turquoise paper it's more like construction paper it has a very undefined grain to it which I like and it is slightly bigger then my sketch because I want to have room around it so that I can fade things out into nothingness.

The first thing I did was to transfer my drawing onto my paper, I did that by lightly going over the lines of my drawing on the back side of the print out I had then I taped it to my paper aligning it to where I wanted it. I have more blank space at the bottom than I have at the top and then I taped it down with blue masking tape and went over the lines of the drawing with the end of a brush to transfer the drawing. After tracing the design on the paper I did have to go over those lines with a pastel pencil to reinforce my lines so I could see what I had on my paper.

Starting in the back and looking at my reference photos, I took a light yellow because I want a nice bright area in the back and I formed an a sunlit area as I moved away from the sunlit area I added touches of orange and red negative painted around most of the areas of the trees and the tree branches and rocks so that my colors would stay dark and clean against the other colors.

Once I had the background in, I started filling in the rest of my painting. I used to dark green underpainting for my pine trees painting around the pagoda in front, I added some deep red in the background - I don't know what it will be but I like the color -  I also use some lighter greens for some of the trees and then for some of the low ground cover I use blue greens. Look at the reference photo and you will see that many of the ground cover plants have a bluish tint to them. For my rocks I used light and dark grays I also have an indigo color that I use for blending and for shadows.

I painted the water with purple and blue and I made sure that as I made strokes on my paper when I was in a pool area to make them look flat my strokes were very horizontal to the top and bottom of the paper, and when I was painting in the fall area, I curved my strokes in the direction the water is falling

This is just under painting and I did not get all of it finished in class I will do that next time, I want to have all of it under painted first and then I will spray for my next layers. Do as much as you can and get your painting to this point. One of the things I haven't mentioned is that I have space all around the edges of my painting so that I have what is called a vignette where I will fade the colors or to blend into the color of the paper. Keep painting and I will see you in class.