Pastel Painting: Yellow Flower Field

 Don't throw away old paintings!

"Yellow Flower Field" 17 x 17 cm Original Pastel Painting.

Available on Etsy

Are you throwing away your old paintings? Well I don't. They are a reminder of how well I am progressing in my art journey. I take out my old unsuccessful paintings from time to time and compare them to my newer paintings. I try to see the mistakes I made. I try to imagine how it would have been better. I try to see my mark making. This is a great opportunity to criticise yourself!

I also use expensive sand paper. I don't want to waste it by throwing away every bad painting. I have used Uart and Fisher sand papers so far. They both can be washed. Yes I am actually talking about taking the painting to the sink and literally washing it with running water. This is what I did to the below painting. You can even scrub it with a bristle brush to recover the paper completely. But I didn't do that with this particular one. Because I like this composition and I intend to do something very similar. So I washed it gently. When its dried, my underpainting is ready!

An old unsuccessful painting washed with water.

Pastel Painting: Abstract Autumn Landscape

 Wet Underpainting

"Abstract Autumn Landscape" 17 x 17 cm original pastel painting.

Available on Etsy

I actually painted this one back in December 2016. I took the photos and everything but I had no time to write about it until now. This blog post is all about wet underpaintings. 

Underpainting is a great method to get rid of the white of the paper. I don't want the white speckles in dark areas especially. It gives a chalky appearance to the painting. So I usually do an underpainting to all of my paintings.

Initial sketch and block in with pastels.

I sketched my scene roughly on the paper and blocked it in with hard pastels. I usually use hard pastels for block in. Soft pastels leave too much pigment for a wet underpainting. If you must use soft pastels you should use a very light touch. Otherwise you will get powdery doughy mess and the amount of water you use will never be enough. So hard pastels work better for this purpose.

Block in wetted with water. 

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!