Rowan’s Lucky Charm, 12 inches by 16 inches, pastel on paper

Kelly asked to see updates of this painting’s progress and I admit I teased her a little by showing her only a few key shots. The thing is with pastel painting there’s often a big bad ugly middle. You’re either carving out or building up - it’s a push pull between getting big forms down, adding detail and making corrections along the way. 

If you’re working with a wet media you can mix colors but working with dry media you have to layer them or create the illusion by placing colors next to each other. While I have a lot of pastels, I don’t have all the colors in the world so there were a lot of decisions to make.

Normally I work all over the page so that the whole painting emerges in layers, that way you can see how all the colors are working in relation to each other. But in this case, I moved top to bottom and left to right because I didn’t want to risk any smudging on the figures. 

In this painting I used pastel pencils, and a combination of hard and soft pastels. You can see the variety of sizes go pastel that I use to create wide swaths of color or to get in fine detail. I couldn’t decide which was the juiciest part of this painting. Did you find the lucky charm?

This one will be winging its way to Cape Cod very soon. Thanks for reading. Comments always welcome!