Recently I used the same reference photo to create very different paintings. The subject is my niece's dog named Stormy, a Great Pyrenees dog that was quite
large, but very gentle and loving. The photo needed artistic interpretation as it was a white dog on white sand on a sunny day. The camera picked up the shadows as blue on both the dog and on the sand.
The first approach entailed using several experimental techniques. I started by applying
white gesso to part of a black pastel paper plus added some glitter acrylic paint. I
then applied soft pastel over the white gesso to create the dog and then finished it with some black gesso
in the background.
The second rendition was more traditional, starting with grey pastel paper and a color palette for a blue sky and beige sand to contrast with the white dog.
Now that you have seen them both--which do you prefer?
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Art Demo
Thanks to the hospitality and great questions from the Arlington Heights Art Guild at my demo earlier this week. With their members as well as some of my neighbors and artist friends, more than 40 people watched me construct a pastel painting from scratch. Although I didn't have time to bring the painting to 100% completion, I shared my approach to starting and working on a painting using soft pastels.
I used one of my photos--a Cape Cod beach scene as a reference and discussed how to layer the pastels from dark to light to achieve the colors and values desired.
The art guild has a scholarship fund raising event each year so I donated the same painting that I had completed earlier to be used in their upcoming auction.
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