Blog

Day 18 of 30 paintings in 30 days: Ever have one of those paintings that you loved, then you thought I'll make one little change which led to bigger changes and then it was a whole new painting and a whole new mess?  That is what happened here.  I started this one a few months back with a simple color wash on Wallis paper and built the figure into the wash and it was a lovely painting.  I should have stopped there.     

" What if I add a suggestion of landscape?" was my next thought and soon the painting became literal in the description of the landscape and the figure was swallowed by everything around it.  I have been surprisingly happy with some of the paintings I have done in this challenge and so I hoped some of that ju-ju would transfer into this one and fix it.  I worked hard, too hard, on this yesterday and this morning.  I did learn some new application with pastel.  I began applying the soft pastels by rubbing them onto a cloth and then applying the color with my finger in the cloth pressing in the pigment to make different marks.  I began rolling the round pastels to see what effect that would give.  Lots to learn but this painting is going back on the shelf.  Perhaps if I had done the challenge previous to this painting I would have known better than to mess with it in the first place.  No title yet, 24x18 Pastel on Wallis Paper.