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This piece has been on the easel a l-o-n-g time!

It began as a plein air sketch painted during the Great Lakes Pastel Conference in May 2010.  One of the members found this charming barn and all of the detritus that surrounded it.  I used my plein air sketch and a purposely bad photo reference to work from.  I did not want to get caught up in copying the photograph and decided that this would be a piece that I would create mostly from memory - thus the long time on the easel.

This painting has evolved through several stages, another struggle between value and color (See a former post called "color vs. value- the dominator") In this case value won.

This was painted using mostly Terry Ludwig pastels.  I have a wide selection of his sets including the grays, darks, greens, and lights.  His lights and darks allow me to extend the value range of typical pastels and his beautiful greens allowed me to play color temperature in place of value change.  The gray set is just plain gorgeous and I used it throughout the painting to tone down colors that were too vibrant.