Artist's Block, Part 2

I am finding that once you spend your hard-earned money on art supplies, you find yourself not wanting to waste them. Unfortunately that leads to another level of artist's block. A good set of pastels can run into hundreds of dollars. Sanded papers and other textured surfaces can be quite expensive. So you find yourself questioning whether a subject is worth the expense of the supplies used to paint it. This is a dilemma if you really like to paint and you want to get better at it. Getting better requires practice, lots of it.

While searching for information about matting and framing pastel paintings (another expense no one tells you about ahead of time) I chanced upon http://www.wetcanvas.com/. Wet Canvas is a great online resource for artists of all skill levels. I won't endeavor to list everything you can find at Wet Canvas. Suffice it to say I got my answers about how to mat and frame and much more. One of the greatest resources is the Wet Canvas reference image library. Members have uploaded a multitude of reference images that can be used as artistic inspiration without paying licensing fees. I wasted no time downloading a number of photos I wanted to paint.

This is the first one that grabbed my eye:

The unanswered question was: can I paint it? I decided to do a couple of trial runs of one apple on Canson Mi Teintes before committing to a full painting. These two pictures were my first attempts with my new set of Blick pastels. I did two trials: one on the textured side of the paper and one on the smooth side.

Blick pastel on textured side of Canson Mi Teintes

Blick pastel on smooth side of Canson Mi Teintes

My first thoughts were:

• I like these pastels!
• I can paint apples!

I was ready to give the full painting a try. But a trip to Hawaii got in my way. I know, what a hardship.