Paint, Frustration, Stop

February 3: Forty-five minutes in the studio. Every time I’m ready to give up, something changes, and I start liking it again. I stood up the entire time which is better for working the main part of the painting (and it doesn’t make my arm sore.)

Last night, “NH Chronicle” had a woman artist, Gretchen (I didn’t catch her last name), talked about scraping off pastel or colored pencil onto sandpaper. She takes a brush and dips it in the dust, then paints on her scene. She mostly does animals. She says this technique makes for a softer pastel painting… and her paintings are beautiful.

So, after playing around with the mountains again and again taking a cotton ball to wipe off sections I’m not happy with, and reapplying pastel, I tried her technique. Hmmm. It worked somewhat. Of course, it’s not perfect because I have so many layers. This is something I’m definitely going to experiment with more.

I’m so up in the air with this. I called it quits before I started getting too upset with my progress again and worked a few minutes on pastel organization. I didn’t take a progress photo.

I took a progress photo. I also cropped the edited version, too, to compare. I’m still trying to decide if I should shorten the painting itself, removing about half an inch from the bottom. I’m getting too much green into the fog.