Field Study turned pastel

Today I started the pastel leg of this adventure. This is from an earlier watercolor under painting and today I applied pastel over it. I learned quite a few things today. I've used this surface before for watercolor and it has been sitting around a while. The paper is arches 140 lb cold pressed although it has far more texture than the 300 lb rough paper. Next pastel that is done on watercolor paper will be on something with far less texture. I'm not a fan of textured paper and as soon as I see the pattern start to emerge my instinct is to fill it in. This can lead to some major problems with pastels. Thankfully I was only using hard pastels and you can keep applying but that could be a real problem with soft pastels. Anyway like I said yesterday value scale and relative shape value are my main focus points right now and this painting did an alright job with that. This is a very simple landscape with four total shapes. There are three horizontal bars and a tree line shape. With such a limited amount of shape variation it is easy to focus on value. The sky holes in the tree need work so that is on the agenda next time but other than that I like the trees. The thing that I liked the best about the painting is right under the foliage on the trunk of the tree I used a vibrant violet purple. Typically this would stick out like a sore thumb in a painting. When I applied it all the colors around it shared the same value which helped it settle into the shape instead of popping out. Perhaps next I will look at chroma alongside value scale. This was a good exercise and will definitely help with my larger paintings.