A Little Complimentary Colour: Postcard No 84

By lindywhitton on September 25, 2024

Life by the River

I'm in a bit of a pastel mood at the moment so I grabbed my Unison landscape set and a small Terry Ludwig set curated by Liz Haywood Sullivan and set to.

My reference today was a photo I took back in autumn. I based a large acrylic painting on the same photo and it sold on it's first outing. It was one I really enjoyed painting and had hoped to keep around for awhile so I plan to paint a similar size pastel painting and this is the small study for it.

Postcard No 84: End of Autumn. Life by the River Soft Pastel on Colourfix paper.

Gotta say I'm very happy with this little postcard. I kept it simple, didn't get bogged down in the detail and stuck to a basic split complimentary colour scheme. I think it works.

This is the acrylic version and you can see it has a boat in it. I decided that I would play up the lichened trees on the left and leave out the boat in the pastel version.

They both work but I just knew I would start fussing over the boat and lose the freshness if I kept it in the postcard.

I did a very simple value map before I started and tried to stay faithful to it as I applied colour.

There are only 3 or 4 values but it's enough to let me know if the composition is likely to work.

It's a good diagonal lead in and hangs on a flattened C shape which takes the viewer round the picture plane quite nicely.

I don't always do thumbnails and value maps but it does help when I do. Even if the reference is exactly cropped how I want it a quick thumbnail helps cement the composition and prepares me to attack the colour version with confidence.

I'll be doing these small value studies for all the pastels in this panorama series.