Santa

I am selling this pastel on suede holiday picture for $300 or buy it on Fine Art America. Work fast and you may send it out as a Christmas Card!

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/santa-2011-debra-jones.html

Peoria Art League demo.

I had a great time exercising my pastels again. It has been a very long time!

I spent a lot more time showing how to use your computer to see more colors than are obvious and how to use the underpainting to loosen up, especially if you are a tight realist (which I proved with a little show and tell of some of my charcoals.

I showed the planning of one piece and underpainted it. From there I demoed the pastel part of it on a second piece. Here is the piece as I left it last night. As usual, I forgot the drawing and underpainting before:

And this morning as I finished it up.

For the gang at the demo I DO have the underpainting from last night. So here are three steps showing how this all works:

This is always where they know I am nuts. All the work I put into the drawing is lost when I slop these erratic colors over my composition. This morning after a little work on the project from last night, I went in and started building out the shapes I was making from the drawing.

There is a LOT of color in the shadows that I can leave and allow to twinkle up in the skin tones. BUT the big key is making the background consistent. The figures really paint themselves if the negative spaces are right.

Thank you all. I had a great evening!

Second Foam Harvesters

I had the opportunity to do an In Service on Wednesday for a gang of teachers. I will say it was nice to have to not start from scratch!

I don't have progress shots, and I am working from a makeshift computer set up as the big machine is dead, dead, dead so I am pushing hard again to get business running... But I digress... I can't see clearly on the screen to be sure this is showing right.


We all attacked the watercolor under pastels in a bit of a guerrilla manner, but not only was it fun to be back in a school room, the gang seemed to enjoy the demo as much as I enjoyed demonstrating!