Sunday, July 11, 2010

Painting in the dark....

Pastel
12x18


Pastel
12x18
Hello! well I've been busy with all sorts of art stuff, but not a lot of watercolor. I've been exploring pastels, zentangles, photoshop and drawing. Since they weren't watercolor I wasn't planning to post, but what the heck, I decided to just go ahead and share what I've been up to.
:-)

Ok, I've never done pastels, and decided to give it a try. I did these two paintings in a Friday night pastel class at the Triton Museum with Jeff Bramschreiber. He's a great teacher and fantastic artist. He taught us different ways of using pastels like using watercolor, alcohol, etc, but my favorite class was painting a still life that he called "Painting pastels in the dark".

The first part of the class would be with the lights on and we would draw out the still life and block in some color, then he would dim the lights pretty low and we would get a totally new perspective and value scheme. It was crazy trying to see your colors in that lighting! but it makes you look at color value differently. When he turned up the lights, it's surprising to see what color choices went on the paper. The last part of the class we would be able to fine tune our paintings and add different colors. Fun!

The crow was painted in the "dark" and the gorilla was done using a photo that Jeff took at some zoo.

I'll post more on the Zentangles, when I get some pictures of my tangles.
Have a Great Day!

5 comments:

  1. These are wonderful. I love that crow. The in the dark theory is interesting. I could see how the values would change. What a nice challenge.

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  2. Sheila, both of these are fabulous, truly. The top piece has a Gothic vibe to it...a bit of Poe and Vincent Price, old rich fabrics...just lovely. The second seems a bit more fun and stylized, yet equally as awesome. Well done!

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  3. These are both nice pastel works Sheila, though I like the gorilla best. Don't know if I could paint in the dark, as I love to see the beautiful colour of the paint working its way around the paper.

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  4. I LOVE the crow - the drama and so very "Poe" in style. A bit sinister, a bit sad... but so vibrant - it just glows! Certainly a story is told here! I will have to remember this technique and try it myself.

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  5. Sheila, I really like the crow; the selection of color behind the crow is really striking and for me creates a sense of mystery about him. Like someone said above, it really is so very Poe! Thanks for following my blog, also!

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