Winter 2016 Pastel Class

Winter 2016 Pastel Class : Cozy Cottage Week 3

This week I started getting into some of the finishing details of this painting. I started adding highlights in some of the snow, I filled in some of the fences and added some of the bushes in along with front road, also, highlights on the house and snow in the trees so I hope that you have gotten your paintings up to this point and we will continue on.

I added snow to the pine trees behind the house using a soft very light blue gray if you don't have any really light colors like a soft grey or a soft blue or lavender you'll have to use your white you can take your stumpy or if you have a color shaper and blend the white into the color of the trees which will soften the white and make it look not so white.

When I put my color on the trees I wanted to make sure that it looked like snow sitting in my trees, not just little clumps of color, think about what you're doing and what it is you're putting down, create smaller shapes as well as bigger shapes but they have to follow what would be the limbs of the pine tree if you need to see what snow covered pine trees look like you can google it and come up with a lot of examples.

Remember I am working on sandpaper so my paper can take a lot of color before I need to do anything to it I did find that it didn't want to take some of the lighter colors on the roof because I had too many layers on already but rather than spraying my paper I chose to remove some of the chalk using a stiff bristle brush and just dusting it off. You can spray sandpaper but remember every time you spray your painting it loses some of the color that you just put down which is why I chose to dust it off.

Mostly I was using my soft light blues and lavenders for highlights but along the top of my house I was using white. I wanted it white to draw attention to the house, I may need to put on more in my final detailing to get it as bright as I want it. I also used the soft blues and purples to create highlights on the drifted snow around the base of the house on the back wood pile or windbreak whatever that is and also for highlights on the road in the background around the pond area that might be getting some sunlight and in the area is right in the same plane or level of the house as I came forward I used my white instead so there's white on parts of the road and white on top of the snow on the fence in the front and on some of the plants around the road.

I also used the white for the smoke coming out of the chimney. I put most of it down next to the chimney and then blended it up into the sky so it looks like it's disappearing.

On the pond I put some chunks of snow or ice that are floating or sitting on top of the water with a little bit of a blue and then highlighted them with the white I also took my indigo color and right around the shoreline and right underneath some of these chunks I put a very thin line of this darker color and then blended it with my color shaper so that it’s just barely there, this gives separation from the shore and clumps of ice with the water and makes it look more three dimensional.

I suggested some of the bushes under the clumps by the road using a dark grey green - the same color I used for the pine trees in the back - by just making some odd shapes, they don't have to be anything else they are covered in snow so you can't see any leaves or any other details at this point you can do some later but I don't think I will.

I also came in and put in the fence post with a dark brown in front and a bit lighter brown in the background.

Lastly I worked on more detail and texture in the snow I'm not going to bring the sunlight all the way to the front that will be in shadow but I did have some Sun on my road just past the end of the fence in the road, I will make some of that middle ground lighter next week because, like it or not, we're going to have to start on the holly bush that comes in from the left hand side. Please try to get as much of this done to this point as you can and keep painting, I will see you in class.