Spring 2017 Week 3

Pastel Project: Farmer's Market Week 3

Once I had everything under painted and based in, then I started adding some detail. It is important to always work around and through your painting so you don't get stuck in one place and it gets over worked while the rest of your painting suffers. Often time the reason the area does not look correct to you is because it looks out of place compared to the unfinished areas around it. It is a better habit to bring things up to the same level before moving to the next level of detail in your painting, a good indicator that you are spending too much time in one place is you feel frustrated with the area you are working on. Time to move on.

Notice that things that are in the background have little or no real detail. Even the little woman's face is just a suggestion as are the fruits on display which are just rounded shapes of color to suggest tops of the fruit, they are not dots or complete circles, just rounded, overlapping shapes. If they got too distinct when I was adding the shapes, I lightly touched and smeared to area to soften and push that area back. Remember: These things are in the background so they are softer, grayer and closer together.

I am just getting started on my worker. I used a very light golden yellow for the highlights on his T-shirt and a soft lavender for the shadows. the "white" boxes are also a light lavender color yet to the eye they read white.

On the floor, I wanted it to look like light was coming in from the door in the background even though you don't see it in the photo, I am the artist and I like the idea that light is coming into my subject.

The detail on the boxes are not precise replicas of what is in the photo, they are more essence suggested with color and shape, don't get too hung up on lettering.

Whenever you start working on detail, you will slow down a bit, just be aware not to get too caught up in it. As an artist you can fool the viewers eye with just a few shapes that might look like something such as the oranges and apples in the foreground: They look like the fruit so it tells the viewer that it is a fruit stand, the viewer fills in missing detail in the background because of what it sees in the foreground.

I will probably finish this either next class or the class after, so keep painting and I will see you in class.