Wednesday, April 1, 2009

No I didn't fall off the edge of the earth!!


But we did spend six weeks away! We drove out to California to spend time with our son and family. The goal was to spoil them so much they wouldn't want us to leave. Mission accomplished Evan asked us why we couldn't stay longer when it was time to head back east!

Before we left I tore my studio apart and started painting it. So that needed to be finished when we got back. Also I wanted my very dark carpet out to get more light in the room. Sooo a visit to Lumber Liquidators and a week later I had a nice new LIGHT floor! Lots of work. The next project was to paint our windows on the outside. After 13 years in this house it is starting to look a little tired and then there's our daughter's wedding in June. We needed the sprucing up!

During rest breaks I was able to do these two paintings of my grand nieces using Ampersand Pastel board as the support.

Noelle admiring her white flower girl dress was done on white pastel board. Perky little Madie is on tan. Both colors worked for different reasons.

It was easy to render Madie's skin tones on the tan. There's a lot of skin in that close up so the tan really worked. A white support made it easier to create the white in Noelle's dress. So I guess what determines the color of the pastel board to be used is what the predominate color of the finished work will be.

Noelle's white dress was a challenge. I wanted to both capture the sheer fabric as well as render a believable white. It turns out white is not white if you really look at it. There's lots of color in it! I didn't want to use grays to contour the fabric. I would have ended up with a dreary looking white. Using my lightest value pencils I layered the complementary colors grayed lavender and cream created believable fabric folds and lively grays. I blended using white and cool grays ranging from 10% to 30%. I am really happy with the result.