Spring Road

Here is another pastel creation of mine that I drew from a picture of a road. The road that I used for this picture was a road that my husband and I drove on to get to the nearest YMCA in Northborough. From the picture, I realized that beauty can be found anywhere, even on the way to the closest public gym in my county :). Anyways, I used many colors to make this drawing, from subtle grays to neon green, my palette had a variety of shades. One of the things I found was hard to do was make sure the background faded away as it got farther away. I needed different values for the different layers of trees found on it. Regarding that fact, this painting took me about 5 hours, and I entered it into an art exhibit at my Art Guild.

Summer Gardens

My friend Fritz sent me his usual photographs of his home in Vienna, a country that I miss very much. When he sent me this picture of his graceful garden pond, I instantly wanted to capture it in my own way. Fritz gave me his permission to do so gladly. As I have been using pastels recently in my custom orders, I wanted to do this for this picture. In all, this took up to 5 hours, in less than one day. I made some changes in my creation to make sure I wasn't completely copying my friend's work. As you can see, it isn't a replica of the photo, I sort of expanded it and moved the angles of it. I liked drawing the water because you have to make it look like there's a reflection and it was cool to experiment with blues, blacks, and even shades of purple. I didn't have a dark green to catch the bright colors, but the picture looked more graceful to me than expected. I decided to submit this work to the upcoming exhibit, where the theme is "Summer Gardens". I enjoy looking at my completed work and I hope many others will as well.

This is a corrected pastel painting. 

I want to thank my facebook artist friends because they gave me great suggestions that made a big difference.

Pencils vs. Pastels

Recently, I created a pastel board on a Canson board. I used two drafts to complete this. The first was colored pencils, and the final draft was made with pastels. My original drawing was supposed to be the final, but I found out that colored pencils were light and faded. It was hard to see bold colors on the horse and rider. I thought of a new solution: pastels. I used pastels on a new board so that they wouldn't smudge. Instantly, I saw better results. The pastels blended well and were bright enough to be seen as a realistic picture, but colored pencils looked like thin crayons with a lot more white space than I thought. I decided to keep the pastel drawing, mainly because of the change in texture, but I also saw some mistakes in my pencil drawing, like the unnatural bend of a foot. Here are the pencil and pastel drawings for you to compare yourself.