Pastel ramblings, and Prague

Well my pastel painting is going to be on hold for awhile.  We are heading to visit the family in VA for 2 weeks, and pastels are not the easiest to transport.  But I did pick up some watercolor paper today and packed up my paints to take with me.  I think it is time to flip back to watercolors for a while anyway. I miss my brushes. And I am interested to try out some of my color theory and palette ideas in watercolors.  I also have tons of reference pictures ready to go.  I am excited to get some pictures of Va for future paintings.  This is my most favorite place on earth yet I have zero paintings of Virginia in my house.  This must change! Charlottesville especially has some gorgeous scenery.

Here is a pastel from a few months back of a cathedral in Prague that we visited a year ago.  The stained glass windows are just amazing in person and I tried to capture their brilliance in this painting by using an otherwise muted palette and saving the brights for the windows. This one is big- maybe 16x20? I have standardized my painting sizes and it will be much easier for faming in the future.  Nearly everything is 11x14 or 16x20. Anything smaller just feels too small and forces me to paint tight which I am trying to avoid.  This is my sweet spot. And the very last marks I put in the painting were the blue violet color around the bottom doorways and it changed everything.  This is what I absolutely love about pastel- those moments that it all changes and you just think "yessssss!" This painting will be listed for sale in my etsy shop.

The Coldest Day Ever, in Paris

I will never forget the day this picture was taken.  We were at a street market in Paris, and it was absolutely freezing.  So cold that even my warm blooded husband was wearing a hat and scarf, and that has happened maybe twice, ever.  So I used the temperature to guide my color choices for this painting, mainly my neutrals.  I started with a cobalt blue watercolor underpainting which turned out to be a great choice.  Then I layered black and some steel grays until I was able to put in the lights and brights.  

Check out the process:

I started with a pretty simple palette.  7 or 8 pastel sticks. You can see my test swatches of the color combinations below. I never use black in watercolors, but i think i will start incorporating it into my pastels more.  And a word about the foam brush on the left- it is the best one dollar I ever spent.  It gives the perfect smudge.  I am not a huge fan of blending, but this tool is great for just softening the edges or blurring a background.  It is also great for just brushing a whole section off if you need to start over. 

Here is the reference photo:

Here is my first attempt:

It is just ok.  The value pattern is good and the red is nice and bright.  But it looks like this flower stand is in outer space. Hmmm.  I let it sit like this on the easel for a few days and looked at it in between my 80 loads of laundry I do every week.

Second and I think final attempt below here.  I think it is done now.  I softened the background, and added more of a light source to the painting. Oh, and sort of gave the people faces.   

Lucky Number 7

I'm going to apologize in advance, there's going to be a lot of art lingo in the post (so Dad you can skip to the bottom of the post to see the finished painting ;-) )  Last week's project started as a simple experiment in making my own sanded pastel paper. The good stuff is not cheap, and my beloved wallis paper is sold out everywhere, even the interwebs. ( I didn't even know the interwebs sold out of things?? Sigh...) Anyway that paper is like $8 a sheet on sale.  I recently saw a video on you tube by Karen Margulis about making your own sanded pastel paper using watercolor paper and clear gesso.  It sounded easy enough so I thought it was worth a shot.  Well, it was sort of a bust.  I am still working on it and it did produce some interesting results but just wasn't giving me what I was looking for.  Maybe more coats of gesso would be helpful? I tried this method on a couple of different surfaces and got interesting results.  

Anyway, back on topic.  So after finishing a painting of a park scene on crappy paper with gesso as an experiment, I decided I really liked the composition and wanted to do the painting over on good paper.  Luckily I had some uart 600 handy (my new go-to).  The painting turned out far better the second go around.  This paper just grips the pastel stick so well and makes it easy to paint rich bold colors.  I liked the second painting better than the first, but something was still not right.  I noodled on it for a few days and looked at some of my favorite paintings trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.  Value patterns right? Check.  Simplified composition? Pretty much. Color harmony? Ouch.  I noted more than once than the color schemes being implemented by my favorite artists were far more simple that what I was doing.  I noticed over and over again that there were specifically 7 different pastel sticks being used and that was it. Even paintings that were portraits. Hmmm... Was I onto something with this? I went down to my easel and investigated.  I used 19 different sticks in my park painting the second go around.  NINETEEN. 

So I started this painting for the third time hoping to see a more professional looking painting. It's funny, the one color I omitted I found indispensable in painting 2- a deep dark green.  I relied instead on a cool blue gray to deepen the mid tone warm green I was using. I like it! And I think it works with less detail in the composition too.  I think number 3 is a winner.  And it is also for sale on my etsy store.

Here are the 3 versions with commentary:

#1- cheap drawing pap covered in gesso with no underpainting.  This was definitely a warm up exercise.  There is no saving the cheap paper. It is frustrating and was a constant fight to layer colors.  Not to mention it eats my expensive pastels.  So it isn't really a money saver after all in my opinion.

#2- much better. The colors layer and blend so nicely on this paper. Uart 600. But the periwinkle blue color in the middle of the painting is distracting. And the foliage is too fussy.  Ahhhh keep trying...

#3 I think this turned out better.  I am pleased with the simplified trees. And the bridge is definitely the best of the 3 paintings. I struggled getting the figures in with such a simple palette (I got it down to 9 sticks).   It works better I think. For those that are curious the painting is of a city park in Budapest. 

Portrait work

Sometimes I want to paint something quick and easy so I will choose a landscape. When I want to challenge myself however I choose portraits. Not necessarily posed portraits, but more like candid shots of my family.  I'll be honest- they are not easy.  Especially when it is someone you look at every day.  After many failed attempts, I finally feel like I am getting better at it.  I have been studying the works of one of my favorite local artists, Margaret Dyer (www.margaretdyer.com), for guidance and clues with realistic skin tones and creating an interesting portrait composition.  Aren't those pictures of someone posing in a chair boring? I think so.  I think that's why I like her paintings. Her figures are always doing something. So with that in mind, I set out to paint a picture of my daughter taken at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.  There was a lot going on in the photograph.  I originally planned on adding more flowers and color in the background, but once I was finished with the figure I didn't want to detract from it with a busy background.  I struggle with simplifying the composition, but I think I held back just enough here.  I am not listing this painting for sale on etsy, but will be creating a listing for portrait commissions soon if you'd like one of your own kiddo or family.

"The Little Flower Girl"

Starting Again...

...not starting over.  Because that would imply that no progress was made, and that's not true.  Each hiatus from painting brings a change in my work, I think for the better.  This time the hiatus was due to the birth of my son. Pregnancy does funny things to your artistic soul. I literally could not even think about art for months, and now all of a sudden I am bursting with ideas and want to paint everything.  In the past two weeks I've finished 4 pastels, and have sketches and references photos ready for new ones.  But first and foremost, I am recommiting to blogging because it holds me accountable to painting.  I need to paint; it makes me feel whole unlike anything else.  And hopefully some of you out there can help me clear out some paintings and buy them from my etsy store (also soon to be revamped). 

I have been working with pastels right now after finishing up a few watercolors, mainly because I ran out of watercolor paper.  But I have fallen in love all over again.  I love the immediacy of pastels and the richness of the color.  And, I can finish a pastel in half the time of a watercolor.  Let's face it, if I paint for 4 hours a week, then that was a great effort with a toddler and a new baby. My focus with my pastel paintings right now lies in a few key areas, and I will explore each of these in greater detail in furture blog posts:
- Color harmony/simplified palette
- Achieving the correct value placement (lights and darks in the right place) with less layers
- A more painterly approach with less detail and a more impressionistic style. 

I have been studying the work of some of my favorite artists online.  You may have seen me pinning the works of Karen Margulis and Margaret Dyer on pinterest to name a few.  I look at these paintings over and over again.  Their work speaks to me.  Or rather, "whispers", in the words of Karen Margulis (she has a great art blog by the way).  There are different things I love about each painting and my goal is to take these nuggets to build my own unique style.  I think back to my work from 5 years ago, and although I am not always happy with what I paint today, I see a big change.  So like I said, I'm starting again.  We'll see what the next "painting season" brings.  In the mean time here is one of my most recent pastels.  This is the fish pond on my grandfathers farm.

"The Fish Pond" Original pastel by Melissa Saulsbury

Back to watercolors

3 recent watercolor paintings from our 2012 trips to Prague, Budapest, and Paris. All are for sale, email me for details at melissa.saulsbury@yahoo.com.

A new breakthrough

My name is Melissa and I\'m a purple-holic. What is the breakthrough you ask? Well, I realized that my favorite paintings I\'d completed all had 2 things in common: 1, I chose the color palette and individual pastels before I got started, and 2, I worked from a black and white photograph. In fact, I worked from FOUR photographs- 2 in color and 2 black and white. I liked the way the baby looked in one photo, and the way the grandma looked in the other, and putting them together was more complicated than I thought it would be. But the end result turned out exactly how I\'d hoped. The picture of the painting i uploaded is a little off (it was taken with my cell phone while my laptop is busted) but you get the idea. The purples are rich and varied, and there is just enough blue to balance the warm skin tones. For the first time I used a lot of green in the shadows of the skin and it worked rather nicely. I was very concerned this would make my baby look like an alien but after observing the skin tones used in some of my favorite paintings I though it was worth a shot. I deem it a success and will be adding this to my permanent collection. After all, it\'s my baby girl and my grandma!