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.