Author: cathmary1030

Drawing A Rose

| cathmary1030

I had so much fun drawing this rose from life (“en plein air”) that I ended up drawing it a second time, in willow charcoal, and then using my NuPastels. This is the original drawing, done in graphite (2B) on ordinary drawing paper. (Pencil marks are terrible to view on the website).

Sometimes I get dissatisfied with the pastel landscapes I’m doing. There’s not a lot of drawing involved, and these fat sticks are irritating. I’m more and more inclined to draw and perhaps “color in” (as needed) with, say, watercolor.

Snowscape in Color

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Here is my snowscape done in color. The snow is partly pink, blue and yellow, and very nearly white where the small bushes are. I removed the little pine tree at the suggestion of a member of Karen Margulis’ Patreon group for pastel classes. Most of the pastels used were Richeson hand-rolled, which is fast becoming my favorite brand.

(I have the comparison between the value study and the color version below. The original image was by Alain Audet from Pixabay.)

This is how the two versions compare:

original value study

ArtTutor.com is Closing its Virtual Doors!

| cathmary1030

ArtTutor.com, the website based in Liverpool, England, where I got most of my drawing training in Phil Davies’ Drawing Essentials course, is shutting down as of the end of March 2022. This is largely due to the pandemic lockdowns, etc.

Many of the courses offered are currently being made available for purchase at a discount to monthly members like myself and at a smaller discount (for a short period of time) to a la carte users of the site.

If you previously bought a course from that site, or if you think you might want to, you have until the end of March to download that course. Downloading can only be done to a laptop or desktop computer, not a mobile phone or a tablet.

Watercolor Color Wheels

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I was playing with my new watercolor travel kit and made two color wheels — one Warm, one Cool. The Warm wheel was mixed from French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red (all Winsor-Newton). I love the orange, but the “purple” and “green” are unappealing. (This was done on 300 lb. paper.)

The Cool color wheel was made up of Winsor (Phthalo) Blue (Green Shade), Winsor Lemon and Alizarin Crimson. The “orange” is unappealing to me, but l love the vivid green. The purple is not too bad.

Value Study for Snowscape

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Today, on Karen Margulis‘ Patreon page, she challenged us to do a painting using only hard pastels like NuPastels, Rembrandts, Cretacolor, etc. Well, my Dick Blick Artist’s Soft Pastels are roughly the hardness of Rembrandts, so I chose to use those.

Then I decided to do a value study for a snowscape based off a Pixabay image by Alain Audet from Pixabay. I may end up using this as an underpainting for that snowscape, but I suppose it could stand alone. I did this on Sand-colored Pastelmat, 9×12.

value study

And these are the sticks I used.

Bog in Winter

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This work is based off a photo by Pexels from Pixabay. I did it on a 9×12 piece of Pastelmat in sand color. I did an alcohol wash underpainting, using NuPastels in orange, rust and deep dark blue. Most of my pastels were Blue Earths and Richeson Hand-rolled, the latter quickly becoming my go-to pastel sticks.

Pink Rose

| cathmary1030

For this painting I used one of my own reference photos — taken last spring of a rose on one of our bushes. We got this rosebush (all of our rosebushes, actually) down in Texas Hill Country at Antique Rose Emporium. I love it because it is powerfully fragrant. So many pretty roses seem to have no fragrance at all.

I did this using willow charcoal and NuPastels, on Colourfix Original in Soft Umber.

New Pastels! Some Terry Ludwigs

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Received my first Terry Ludwig pastels today. Seems like a lot of pastelists prefers Terry Ludwigs to other brands, or at the very least, consider them among their top 5 brands to use. Rather than buying a pre-determined set, though, I chose to fill in some holes in my own collection with individual sticks. And naturally, I had to buy the famous V100 “Eggplant” color, which I’m excited to try!

If I like them — and actually use them — I may buy a full set at a later date.