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.
Today I painted the same scene as yesterday, using the same pastels, but using UART 400 paper (again from my Jackson’s Art sampler set). This paper was easier to use, and I enjoyed it very much. The marks I made were much bolder — automatically — on the UART 400 paper.
Image by Evgeni Tcherkasski from Pixabay
And here are the two paintings side by side. The velour version appears much softer, almost as if the image is blurry.
Today I tried velour paper that I received in my sampler from Jackson Art. It was a very different texture; it feels to me the pastels just lay down on the top of the paper. And that the paper almost “resists” side strokes. It was fun to try, using Richeson, Blue Earth, Dick Blick and my one Terry Ludwig pastel, but I’m not certain I would buy this paper on a regular basis.
The reference image is by Evgeni Tcherkasski from Pixabay
I did this work from life, using a sheet of Colourfix Original paper in Dark Green Leaf shade. I did not do any underpainting, and was using Richeson Hand-rolled and some of my new Mount Vision pastels. The Richeson pastels, to my mind, really work well on this paper, especially if I don’t do an underpainting in NuPastel.
I decided to skip including the mountains around Lake Louise, and focus in on the poppies. The result is that what is actually the lake looks like sky. But maybe that’s okay. This study was done on Colourfix Smooth in Blue Haze.
I had no idea what to paint today, so I just started randomly putting NuPastel on paper, and then I rubbed it in with a paper towel. Now I had an underpainting (of sorts) but didn’t know what to do with it — at first. Then I realized it reminded me of autumn trees.
My trees are cartoonish, but the whole picture is straight from my imagination, based on the colors and shapes of the random “underpainting”.
Yesterday’s sunset looked a bit like a fried egg, didn’t it? So I tried it one more time. This time I used Art Spectrum Colourfix paper, in the Terracotta shade.
While this painting is hardly a masterpiece, I feel most satisfied with it, and I finally got the reflection looking a bit more realistic than on my previous tries.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 