Month: December 2021

Painting of the Day: Glass Vase in Gray Scale

| cathmary1030

Today’s pastel painting was done on Rembrandt pastel paper, using 3 NuPastels: Warm Deep Gray, Warm Very Light Gray, and touches of Warm Medium Gray. This was a value study in preparation of a color piece which I’ll be doing on a sample scrap of Sennelier Pastel Card (bought last year as a part of a sampler from Jackson’s Art).

The original picture in color is below. I also downloaded the Android app Color Grab, and played a bit with color choices. While that was fun, I quickly became overwhelmed at the thought of using so many colors for the vase!

I decided to simplify to an extreme by editing my photo to be grayscale, and then using Adobe Photoshop Elements to posterize the grayscale photo to get the two extremes of values. The posterized version was the reference for my pastel.

I am underwhelmed by the texture of the Rembrandt pastel paper; I do not care for the honeycomb look at all.

Follow-along: Rendering Glass #1

| cathmary1030

I watched Marla Baggetta‘s video of her painting a blue glass bowl and made my own attempt. I imitated Marla in using the “Blue Spruce” NuPastel to sketch the bowl, but that’s not something I would do again — my own preference would be to sketch in a much lighter color pastel.

I think the pastels are quite “muddy”, and I had an Aha moment later when I realized I lay down the color with a heavy hand. I think I filled up the tooth of the paper.

I also had a difficult time imitating Marla’s strokes; although I used the side of the pastel, either the pastel was too “slippery” or the paper not toothy enough. It felt to me the pastel was “skipping”.

Portrait in Charcoal

| cathmary1030

This portrait is based on a photo I downloaded from Pixabay. I used soft vine charcoal for the large shaded areas, For the more detailed areas, I used charcoal pencils 2B and 6B, in addition to Conte crayon in light gray, with mere touches of Conte in white. The rendering was done on Strathmore 400 gray toned sketch paper.

Based on an image by endorassi from Pixabay

Persimmon Study

| cathmary1030

This persimmon is from our tree (which has largely been picked over by now, by my husband harvesting, and by the local blue jays pecking at the fruit).

I held the persimmon in my left hand, looking down at it as I painted with my right hand. My goal was to paint the detail as realistically as possible. The primary pastel I used was one from Great American, called Marigold (585.0) I love the vibrant color — perfect for this fruit!

The photo is of the specific persimmon, but was taken afterward, and is rotated 90 degrees to the viewer’s left relative to the sketch.