If in doubt....

Self Portraits are my default position. I have lost count of how many I've done just since I started this blog, let alone in my lifetime, but if you click on the 'self portrait' label at the bottom of this post it'll give you some idea.
This is a piece I started over a year ago, and yesterday I worked on the bottom-left corner in soft pastels. I only used a golden yellow, a greenish blue (peacock almost), a dark pinky-red and a creamy white.
It's still wrong - the nose it too wide, and just wrong with the shading of the bulge looking like a second set of nostrils, and the chin ends too low down. But I like the open mouth, the expression it adds.
I want to keep the top-right as pencil and not work over it, but I'm not dure how to move from colour back into black and white. Conte crayon would work, but that's a 'safe' medium for me. Oooh, maybe collage. But I need to correct the pastel area before I'll feel happy to move on.

Through blogging I have made many friends like Gesa, Vivien, and Chris. Casey Klahn is another person who has mentored me over the last couple of years. He is an award winning artist based in Washington State, USA, and he has honoured my by featuring my sunflowers on one of his blogs, Pastel.
In the mean time I have been getting on with painting the rosehips I gathered on Monday, and re-organising my studio space. It's becoming a place I like to retreat to, and I'm managing to grab what time I can in between all the other demands on my time. For example, last night I did 40 minutes painting straight after the school run, and painted the two top-left rosehips shown here. Then, after cooking tea and dropping my two kids off at Karate practice, I had another 45 minutes to add the bottom-right rosehip, and fix and re-position a book case in the studio. During which I listened to a recording of Mendelssohn's Elijah. Stirring stuff.

Rosehips

We have been scouring the local hedgerows for fruit to put in our hedgerow jam. These hips from Dog-Roses just cried out to be painted. So now my studio has a pile of cuttings in the sink and is crawling with small spiders.

Taming the rose

I decided to see if I could loose the overall scribblyness of my previous paintings yet still keep the rose lively. I love the structure I've managed to capture, but I think this rose lacks umph. Back to the drawing board.

Ivory white roses

A second outlet has been found for my sunflowers. so that's all seven of them up for sale. A huge thank you to my sister Mel who's been doing lots of running around getting my work accepted and mounted ready for sale.

So today I spent some time clearing space to actually work in my studio, instead of it just being used to store art materials, while I find a place to work elsewhere in the house.
And here are the fruits of the labour that followed; three roses of the pale variety.

My work is now for sale

My wonderful sister Melanie has found an outlet for our work. A gallery/cafe in Poynton, Cheshire is exhibiting six of my sunflowers and eight of Melanie's still lifes. This is a very exciting time. We drank champagne last night to celebrate, and this feels like the beginning of something. It took me nearly 30 years to get to this point, and it's taken Mel about 3 weeks of intensive tutoring from me. I've taught her all I know, and it only took 3 weeks........
Melanie and I have had an absolute ball this last month, living our art every waking hour, and even dreaming about it too. You know how intense and all-consuming it can be when it's this good. Now we're taking bets on who gets the first sale.
Time to say thank you to you guys; you have been my mentors and peers these last two years. I am so honoured to have found you, and that you've stuck with me.

Sunflower #1

Soft pastels on a dark brown gound.

Oak Tree studies I, II and III

Exercise 5 - blending

The teacher is wrong. He advises painting in the pears, then adding the background. But he's wrong. Also, after I'd done some fine blending in shades of green and yellow, I decided that it was all to tame, so I livened it up with some impasto in reads and blues. Then I worked over that with the yellow again.
The background was a flat grey, so I made it purple, to zing against the green, then worked over in a chilly blue to send it all backwards again.
At some point I stopped looking at the pears and just looked at the painting to see if it was all working as a piece, and I think that's when I made leaps. I am very, very happy with this piece.

Exercise 4 - Impasto

Why did I paint a cantaloupe? Because the watermelon was too heavy for the hand basket. The texture was hard to capture, and I'm much happier with the pomegranate.

Impasto was great. I found it hard to lay on the pastel thick enough first time, due to my lack of certainty about the final placement of colours. But I enjoyed going over it all with a thicker layer, slightly adjusting the shapes as I went. I wish I'd used stronger under painting to build up a depth or red and green to work over. I will definitely use this approach on future subjects.

Exercise 3 - Linear technique

At last I get into the swing of pastel painting, then I get a tummy bug (for the third time in a couple of weeks) which puts the kibosh on getting anything done for a while. Plus we're off to the in-laws caravan for the weekend (illness permitting) so, though I may get some sketching done, I'll not be working on these exercises til next week at least.

So here's last night's offering. I didn't think there were legs on this technique but now I'm not so sure. Maybe it's a good way to play around with mixing colours before committing. I found the nectarine difficult, the apple was quite easy, and the orange was a trial but I think I conquered it.

After work yesterday I went into Newcastle and stocked up on pastel paper, hard pastels, and fixative. I also chose two boxes for pastels, as I'd cracked the Ferrero Rocher box I used to use. Actually, the unfinished wood would take well to pyrography. That's a project for another month, me thinks. Don't the pastels look amazing in this box. They cry out to be picked up and used.

Exercise 2 - colour

This was harder than I expected. but I enjoyed looking at the reflected colour in the fruit - the orange light cast onto the lime, the yellow of the lemon reflected back on the orange. I'm also surprised at how much reflected light there is underneath from the table top.
I didn't like the background he suggested of random cross-hatched marks, so I ended up using my trademark squiggle to fill in the blanks. I think it works here because the fruit are so solid.
This time I was stood at the kitchen window in late afternoon, so no messing around with bedside lams on kitchen units. But the light is fading, so the next one may be by candlelight.

Hmmm, local colour and modelling

I do admit that I'm starting to enjoy this, and I'm starting to care about these grapes and bananas.

Grrr, hmmmm

Yup, it's too low down on the paper, but I like the lighting. Must keep an eye on the difference between the lit grapes, and those in shadow with only reflected light from the tablecloth.

Adding local colour next, so it says in the book.

Grrrrrrrr

My sister made me do it. I am working my way, page by page and step by step, through a book called Pastels In 10 Steps by Ian Sidaway. The reason being is that my sister, Mel, who is just starting out as an artist, has learnt a lot about acrylics working through a book. And I'm stuck for what to do with my art.

So I found this book in the library and I liked what he'd done on the back page, so I thought I'd give it a go. Even though it means doing poxy still lifes step by poxy step.


Here's the first step - in bananas and grapes. It's blurred because you're meant to brush off the excess pastel before moving on. It's not the absinthe, honest. Though I could do with a stiff drink. Setting up the still life was a chore. I mean - Cezanne had it easy; 8pm at night and he's only got one light bulb swinging from a bare cable in the middle of a room. Me; I've got 6 light sources in the kitchen ceiling alone. I had to resort to grabbing the bedside lamp, but now I can see the still life and my drawing board, but not the pastels to my left, or my feet for that matter.

Looking at this photo I see I've placed everything too low on the page but I'll be damned before I re-do it. The left side of my brain isn't a happy bunny at the moment. Don't mind me - I'm off to block in the dark areas on and around each grape. There's 43 of them by the way. I know. Because I counted them. I thought drawing and painting was meant to be a calming exercise.

Grumble mumble.

Spring Clean

The side-lit leaves look so fresh and cool.

I couldn't find a green dark and dull enough for the rest, so I used two muted purples. I think the light sky is not flat enough, though, and I want to work over the foliage to get more depth, as it's looking flat.

So I'll re-do this one again and show you the results when I'm done.

Spring has sprung....

Can anyone complete this saying?

Brass Pot

Charcoal preliminary drawing, soft pastel modelling and colour. As you can guess I was stuck by the variety of colour in the brass.

Still life with a box of red wine

This is more like it, and the brother-in-law is on the Martini. The bad news is that I think I've lost my sister. Here's what happened; we read through an exercise in one of the books I'd brought on the stages of painting a still life in pastels - start out with a charcoal outline, then lay in the shadows gently, then put in the local colour of the objects, then develop these with modelling, and finally add detail. Mine was going fine, so I stopped for a bit to look at what my sister was doing, and made a few suggestions, and then some more. It was when I asked if she minded if I drew on her work to demonstrate what I was failing to convey in words and she adamantly told me NO! that I knew I'd overstepped the mark.

We laughed about it, and she's been digging me about it ever since, but I think I've learnt that if we're drawing together, to leave her to it until she asks me for help or advice. She is also an Open University tutor, and understands how to give feedback, constructive criticism and all that. I don't. I'm a well-meaning oaf who can't keep her gob shut. I'm just glad she hasn't asked me to go home.

Still life with stewed tea

Here's the first still life I've drawn in a long, long time. One of my sisters has started drawing and painting, and she'd asked about soft pastels. So we set up a still life, and had a go. Mine was a monumental failure. I won't even say that it was fun to do, and the whole time I was gasping for a cup of tea. It's done on A4 pastel paper, and the whole image is too small, leaving me no room to explore the surfaces and describe the shapes. I haven't done any underpainting, just lashed on the local colour, put in some detail, and then wondered why it all went so wrong. Back to the drawing board. Well, actually, back to the 'How to Paint in Pastels' books I've brought with me. In the mean time, I'm having a fantastic time at my sister's, as I always do.