Pastel Painting Lessons & Techniques
"Audubon Marsh"
Winter is a quiet time on old Cape Cod (not as quiet as it used to
be, but still pretty quiet). One particularly cold and windy day (about
20 degrees with a strong 15 mph or so bitter wind whipping off the
water) a friend asked me if I was interested in going for a walk along
the Wellfleet Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary's marsh walk. I cannot imagine
what she was thinking choosing such a cold day, or what I was thinking
when I accepted, but it was incredibly beautiful, and when I was able
to extract my frozen fingers from my gloves long enough, I was able
to get some wonderful photographs. Several paintings resulted from
this trip, including the one below.
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This is
the image that I worked the most from. It's a digital image...and
not too bad given how frozen my fingers were when I took it!
And, yes, I do work mostly from photos. The debate will rage
on forever I am sure, but for me, a number of factors make the
studio a necessity. Carrying my collection of 800+ pastels into
the field is simply not practical (actually I did take about
200 once, and dropped one tray into the hog cranberry ...not
fun at all to pick up!). Also, my work tends to be so detailed
that a single painting can take me 40-50 hours, and I teach
full time, so much of my painting time is in bits and snatches.
If I were to add the limitations of weather (i.e., incredible
cold in this case) and daylight, I'd never get to paint at all! |
I was fascinated in this image with the wind-whipped shape of the
tree in the right side of the photo. It was days like this, I knew,
that shape those trees that way, and I wanted to capture that in this
painting. I also wanted a clear impression of the marsh and marsh
grasses beyond. I was not thrilled by either the tree on the left,
or the one that shows in the extreme right, so those were both eliminated
as was the foreground bush cranberry that I was standing on.
This painting was done on Wallis brand archival (professional grade)
paper, with a combination of many brands of pastels (mostly Rembrandt
and Winsor-Newton).
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Step 1:
I started this painting with a rough (very rough) sketch of
where I wanted the tree and the water. I also put in the land
far off in the background. You will notice that though it is
not the focus of the painting, it is sketched in quite carefully.
In a location such as this, the distant land is very distinct
and if not put in correctly would cast doubt onto the location
of the painting from anyone who lives in this area, so it had
to be accurate. |
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Step 2:
This painting was done with a new twist for me. I decided to
underpaint it with watercolor. While I have underpainted small
sections before, I have never done it on such a large scale.
I'm not even sure why I wanted to do it, but I felt strongly
that I just did, so I did. Once it was in, I was excited. I
had just what I wanted in composition, color, and feel. It would
have been tough to hold me back at this point! |
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Step 3:
The next step was to layer in my sky. I did this mostly
with Winsor-Newton. While I do much work with Rembrandts,
the softness of the Winsor-Newtons practically paint the
sky by themselves.
I wanted some clouds in the sky, at the same angle of the
tree, so as to suggest that wind coming off the water. But
I didn't want this to be a painting of the clouds, or to
have the clouds overwhelm the tree, so I put them in much
more gently than in the original photo. I also layered in
some purplish along the horizon. For reasons I do not entirely
understand, on days like this, these clouds tend to bunch
up over the end of Provincetown, which would be beyond the
point of land that you can see to the left. I did this more
for feeling than anything else.
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