Edinburg paint out

 Yesterday I failed to post anything so today I am showing two of the plein air paintings from the Edinburg paint out. Last night was spent going through all my hard pastels and breaking down the large pieces to manageable sizes, thinning duplicates, and rearranging them. The two paintings shown here were the last two that I did today. This wasn't a great day but I've had far worse painting outside. This morning it was extremely foggy. The check-in was at 8 but sunrise was at 7 so I got there at 6. There was no sunrise. All the street lights went off and it got lighter, but I still couldn't see anything that wasn't directly in front of me. After I made it home and was cleaning up a lightbulb went off. Break down everything into as few of shapes as possible. The paintings that im not showing are from a creek and instead of breaking everything down to as few as shapes as possible I tried to paint everything that I saw. That is almost impossible with pastels at the size I'm painting. These last two were out in the open on farmground and I'm not sure if it was me starting to come into it or painting these scenes often that made me do it, but I followed that advice. For now on the mantra will be followed and we will see what that does to my work.

Painting Skies

Today I went with another landscape element that is one of the most if not the most important part of a painting, the sky. This particular study was practicing a sunset. I like the wispy clouds and how they are darker than the sky. Typically when I do skies the clouds are the lightest things on the paper. Usually they are negative shapes while the sky is a positive shape but these are backwards. After doing the studies I realized that I should have added some rocks but that was after the fact. Also these sky studies are only 5x7 so it is hard to really get rocks and sky into the same painting unless the rocks are huge boulders or rock faces. Which could have been easily the case if I had thought it out ahead of time. Tomorrow I will practice a new landscape element and try and do a larger study piece at the end that combines rocks, a sky, and the new element.

Today's plans foiled

 Today I had planned on continuing the abstract series and was foiled by muddy paper. The other papers my daughter had drawn on were cheaper and lighter papers. That coupled with her poking holes in most of the drawings made me take another route today. These are two of the many rock formation studies that I did today. They are a lot of fun to do and are only 4 by 5 inches at max so I can get a lot of them done. This got me to thinking I should do a mini landscape elements series. If it wasn't so difficult to do pastels in the studio right now I would continue on with the old series but as things stand I'm going to have to put the pastels on hold. These small paintings will be easier to do on a daily basis and will help build up some knowledge on these individual elements so it is easier to put them together in larger paintings. I've already got a lot of river and waterfall paintings that have been on my mind but I wasn't sure how to do the rocks. Once I get water and trees down those paintings should flow out.

Good problems to have

Today my daughter got into my watercolor paper and took some pencils to town across it. She made some interesting marks that didn't look recognizable so I decided to make an abstract out of it instead of erasing it. I'm happy with how this turned out with all things considered. Typically if she gets a hold of something that she isn't supposed to it doesn't end well. After she did it I let her have a few more pieces of paper to play with. If I have time the next couple of days it will be devoted to completing her abstract series. Painting abstracts helps me get over the hump in the road that occasionally happens. After the last couple days of working on pastels I remembered how hard they are to do in the house. Pastels are much more suited for working outdoors or in a studio that is set up to extract the dust. Thankfully Ron Burgess  http://ronburgessart.com/ (you should check out his work) showed me how to make a quick trow for collecting fragments and most dust but somehow I still seem to make a mess.

Experimenting with pastel on watercolor paper

In the pursuit of trying new materials this morning 90lb hot pressed watercolor paper was used for the ground. For those that don't use pastel, the ground is the surface you apply the pastel to. It is typically a type of paper or board. The surface of the paper or board needs to have texture that the pastel can catch as it is dragged along the surface. 90lb hot pressed watercolor paper has almost no texture and is about as smooth as paper used for printing. I knew going into this that I would have a hard time but didn't expect it to be anything like it was. When I apply pastel I have a bit of a heavy hand. That is something that I need to work on and it isn't that big of a problem on sanded paper which I usually use. This paper that I used today would only allow one passing of pastel before the surface was full of pigment. This is a big problem if you want to layer or you slightly overlap your dark areas with lighter values. Any over lapping causes the subsequent layer to come off onto the pastel stick in hand and turns what is being laid down into mud.

Thankfully I didn't spend to much time on this experiment because I knew where it was headed before I began. The composition is weak and everything smudged up making it look like a child's finger painting. After painting this I realized how fortunate I was in the beginning of my pastel journey that I was told to get good paper. Like it is in watercolor, the paper is one of the biggest factors in overall appearance and ability to manipulate the medium. Unlike watercolor, pastel is a forgiving medium and you can simply wipe off what you don't like and redo it. Although I just threw this painting away because you can't fix something that wont work in the first place. In watercolor you can sometimes get good surprises, in pastels the surprises typically are not good. If you are just beginning in pastel do yourself a favor and buy good paper to work on until you have the basics down. I could see getting horribly frustrated after doing this a couple of times and thinking that was normal characteristics of the medium.

1st place non-prof plein air paint out

This is the painting I turned in yesterday for the paint out. It received the blue ribbon in the non-professional class. This small red trailer was parked underneath of a tree back at the northern fence of the fairgrounds. There was hardly anyone around and it was in the shade so it was perfect for knocking out a painting quickly.

Last Night at the State fair

Last night we went to check out some of the other exhibits outside the art building. We were headed out when we saw the storm coming in and we had just made it out from behind the grand stands when we were hit with wind and sand. Almost instantly we heard the screams from the stands. I thought a tornado had touched down on the other side of the structure so we began running. We ran for the closest structure which was the swine barn and they announced there was no tornado so we began running for the car. At the west end of the track two large guys with lights were stopping people from crossing the road. It was blindingly dusty and I could barely see. They stopped a large group of people from crossing the road that didn't want to stop. If it wasn't for those guys pushing them back they would have been ran over by the cops entering that end of the track. The cops came up from behind us with their lights on but you couldn't see them until they were right there. After that we ran the rest of the way to the car. After we had gotten out away from the fair we heard what happened.

I'm sorry for those who lost those close and to those who were injured may speed come to your recovery. Thank goodness for those who ran in and helped, and those two men at the west gate of the track.