Failure

There is nothing like a failed painting to remind me how much I have to learn. For that matter, what I consider my successes would be considered failures by experienced artists. Here are some examples of recent failures:

pastel on Canson Mi Teintes, textured side

 I did this painting based on a photo of breaking surf in Hawaii. The photo was beautiful, the painting isn't. The first mistake was using the textured side of the paper. The second mistake was working as I was viewing the photo on my tablet. I was unable to see all the nuances of the rocks and did not capture their beauty. The final mistake was when I sprayed on some Spectrafix fixative in hopes of being able to add more pastel. I didn't do a good spray job and some of the pastel ran. Lessons learned. If I were to try this again, I would do it on another surface (or at least on the smooth side of the Canson). I may have to try it again because, take my word for it, the photo is beautiful.

pastel on Wallis over pastel/alcohol underpainting

This is another painting based on one of my Hawaii photos. I really love the photo this was based on, but once again I couldn't capture its best qualities in a painting. I wasn't able to capture the light and shadows, as well as the beautiful variations of color and reflections in the water.

I decided to make an attempt to fix it. I removed all of the pastel down to the underpainting and tried again. I went for a looser style, but can't say that it improved matters any. And I wrecked the composition when I made the stream wider.

re-work over same underpainting

pastel over watercolor underpainting on Wallis sanded paper

This painting is supposed to be a hibiscus, but it ended up looking like either a frilly flying saucer, or huge orange lips. I was painting this as a gift for my sister-in-law for doing me a favor and ended up with nothing to give her. In retrospect, I think the problem is that the flower appears to be floating in space against the background. I should have realized the composition was a problem when this was in the underpainting stage. Maybe I can salvage this by working on the background, at a minimum add a stem and leaves so the poor blossom isn't suspended in space.

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.

Artist's Block

So now that the class is over what do I do? Starting by gathering the tools of the trade, I bought a small adjustable table for my bedroom "studio" and some pastel paper (Canson Mi Teintes). Now I had something to paint with, but what to paint? I have a number of photos I took of the garden of my old house and thought something in that group of pictures must be pastel-worthy. I settled on a photo of a red maple in bud. It's one of my favorite photos and simple enough that I should be able paint it with my limited skills. I picked out one of the blue-tinted sheets of Mi Teintes and started to paint.

NuPastel on Canson Mi Teintes, textured side

Here's what I learned: I do not like the textured side of Canson Mi Teintes. I had to do a lot of blending with shapers and paper blenders to make the texture less noticeable. Some people might like the texture, but I don't, especially when I am going for a more realistic look.

For my first effort, I am pleased with the result. This painting now hangs in my main-floor powder room.