Life by the River
I'm caught up doing three commissions at the moment. My housekeeper is laid up still after his op so I'm also doing all the cooking, cleaning and yard duty. I'm generally very spoilt as I do very little housework. My supportive husband does most of the boring household chores. He professes to be quite happy to free me up for my art and he never makes me feel guilty about the arrangement...and now I'm rediscovering just how much there is to do to keep a house tidy and people fed and in clean clothes!
Today I spent most of my time working on a commission but I did take time out to do a postel postcard. I made it do double duty because I'm working on a series of panorama formats and I want to play with a few different compositions in some small studies before I commit to larger pastel works.
This looks suspiciously like an autumn scene and it is. So not a study done from life but one done from photos taken during autumn. I've replanted one of the trees because it made better sense in the overall composition. A little flexibility with the vegetation is always a good thing.
Here is my setup when I'm working out a study for a larger painting.
I cut a piece of pastel paper to the same ratio as the larger work I'm planning. Then I tape up the reference ( which might be a photo or a sketch or both) next to it.
I start with a simple value study. next I decide if I'm going to stay faithful to the local colour of the scene or play a bit with the colour.
I might do this intuitivley or get out the colour wheel to explore some colour schemes.
In today's postcard the local colour fitted nicely with a tetrad scheme of red/green and yellow/blue so that's what I opted for.
I paid attention to the dark values in my value study as they are the design device moving the viewer through the picture.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the resultant study and think it will translate well to a larger work- around 40 x 70cm.
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