Pastel Painting: Dandelions in Sunset

 Using paper towel for underpainting.

"Dandelions in sunset" 17 x 17 cm original pastel painting.

Available on Etsy

I woke up to this scene below this morning! Snow everywhere. It looks nice yes but it is freezing. So I planned to paint something warm and summery. Also NO REFERENCE PHOTO today. I always use one or more reference photos for a painting. I decided to challenge myself so we will see how it goes. 

My front yard this morning!!

I will talk about paper towel underpainting in this post. I made my rough sketch and blocked in the initial colors as below. I twisted a piece of paper towel and rubbed the pastel in with it. Rubbing the initial block in with a paper towel creates a light and dreamy underpainting with soft edges. This I like very much. It takes away the excess pastel so the paper texture is not affected. You can never worry about filling up the tooth of the paper with this method. One downside is that  it creates a lot of pastel dust. So be careful when using this method. You will have to blow on the paper to get rid of the pastel dust. So you must take the paper outside. You should never blow on a pastel dust indoors. Also for each color make sure to use a clean side of the twisted paper. Otherwise the underpainting gets muddy.

Initial block in rubbed in with a twisted piece of paper towel.

Then I reinforced the darks in trees and I darkened the foreground a bit more as below. Again I rubbed it in with a twisted paper towel. This is the second layer of the underpainting.

Pastel Painting: Summer Evening

 Summer Evening, 17 x 17 cm pastel an art grade sand paper.

Available on Etsy

Here is todays painting and how I painted it. I wanted this painting to be a little bit dark but golden sunny at the same time. So I painted the entire pastel paper in yellow ochre. This is my empty canvas for this painting. 

Fisher400 pastel paper painted in yellow ochre.

 I made my own yellow ochre by mixing tiny touch of red and payne's gray to yellow acrylic paint. Here is my little Nutella jar filled with the mixed paint. Making excuses to eat more Nutella here :)))

Mixed yellow ochre in tiny Nutella jar.

First Blog Post

Hello everyone! I have dediced to create a blog for my daily paintings. Hopefully this will help keeping me motivated to paint everyday. So as my first post I am sharing some of my previous paintings. I will try to make step by step demos for my paintings to stay tuned!