This time, I decided to play around with dipping my chalk pastels in water and then putting them on flat canvas:
“Afternoon in the Park” 9 x 12 Chalk pastel on canvas
Using the wet chalk directly on the canvas had a nice loose effect, giving an impressionist feel to the trees and water.
To read more about this experiment with pastels, visit my art blog.
I knew that when I took pictures at Irvine Park on a summer day several years ago, I was capturing some great light effects on the trees that would give me plenty of painting material later on. I lost most of the photos, so I guess I’ll be making another trip out that way to get some new pictures of all the beautiful shadowy trees and water.
The painting above was done in one day, so I’m hoping to use this method to get back into daily painting, or at least a few paintings a week. This means I need to make room for some new work, and am listing some of my previous daily paintings on ebay to find them good homes.
The weather’s been so pleasant lately, I’ve been wishing I could get outside for some plein air work– unfortunately, I’ve got a clingy baby who disagrees, so I’ll be using photos of the outdoors as inspiration to get that Southern California light into my paintings instead.
Check out my plein air collection of prints on RedBubble if you’d like to see some works I’ve done in more peaceful times, back when I only had to wait for one kid to take a nap in order for me to get some painting done.