Sale at Blick, There Goes My Monthly Budget

Yesterday was the beginning of the "back to school" sale at the local Blick store. One of those deals where the more you buy, the more you save. In this case, 60% off on stretched canvases if you buy 10. So guess where I was yesterday afternoon. I ended up buying 10 canvases, some acrylic paints, varnish and a brush. All told I spent a little over 200 US dollars. Sometimes you have to spend big bucks to save big bucks.

Here is some irony: when I was looking for classes to take at the beginning of my retirement, I opted out of a quilting class because the list of supplies looked too expensive.

Today I am back to painting with acrylics. I had a lot of fun with the two recent pastel paintings but I don't want to let my recently-developed acrylic painting muscles atrophy. So my plan is to switch back and forth. I started to paint a hibiscus but haven't finished. It's in that awkward phase right now. I hope to finish it tomorrow. Here is a peek:

Notice my wonderful art studio (AKA kitchen) in the background. This is one of those moments when it is a good thing I am not married.

I also got around to framing the two waterfall paintings and I will be hanging them as soon as I find a good spot for them. For pastels of this size I like to frame them without mats. So I use spacers from FrameTek to keep a space between the pastel and the glass.

I'd like to hang them side by side. For now they are just propped up on my fireplace mantel.

I Love Waterfalls

Pastel over watercolor underpainting on PastelMat, approx. 16 X 12 in.

Today's painting is another tropical waterfall. Who doesn't love them? My inspiration was a photo I took on my vacation in Hawaii.

As with Tuesday's painting, I painted a watercolor underpainting first, then finished with pastels. The surface is PastelMat, which grabs the pastels quite well, considering how velvety smooth it feels. I was able to put down quite a few layers of pastel, which is quite helpful when you are painting water. For Tuesday's painting I used Grafix Double Tack to adhere the PastelMat to acid free foam core, then did the underpainting. I noticed a slight amount of bowing due to the PastelMat swelling a bit from the water. So today I stapled the paper to an art board, painted the watercolor, then adhered it to the foam core after the watercolor dried. The staples left impressions in the paper, so I probably won't do that next time.

For what it's worth, here is the underpainting:

More Supplies

Towards the end of my community ed class in early March it became clear to me that 1) I really enjoyed painting with pastels and 2) I needed to invest in some "soft" pastels. I ended up buying a small set of Sennelier soft pastel half sticks. Sennelier makes very beautiful, rich, soft and smooth pastels (not to be confused with their oil pastels, a completely different beast). I figured the half sticks were the way to go because I could get a feel for them without the additional expense of full sticks.

I also wanted a more complete set of colors, so I also bought a full-stick set of Blick Artists pastels. So-called "soft" pastels actually come in various levels of hardness/softness and generally are classified as hard, medium and soft pastels. The Blick Artists would probably be placed in the medium category. I chose the Blick pastels because 1) they are very reasonably priced compared to other more well known high quality pastels and 2) they were the only ones I could find on the Blick web site that did not have California Prop 65 warnings about potentially harmful, cancer-causing, chemicals. Since I usually use an art barrier cream (Gloves in a Bottle), and I don't eat the pastels, the Prop 65 warning probably shouldn't be that big of a deal. But I figured why not try the Blick pastels and see how they work.

So far I have been very satisfied with the Blick pastels. I have found that some colors (mostly darker) are harder than others, but so far that hasn't been much of a handicap.

Now that I had the pastels I needed to determine what types of pastel support would suit my style (once I figure out what my style is). Through our instructor I found out about the Dakota Pastels web site (http://www.dakotapastels.com/pages/index-sale.aspx). Dakota offers sampler packs of both pastel papers and boards. I put in my orders for both. Now I was ready to go but still didn't know what to paint.