Never quite satisfied with the tools I have available to me, I decided it was time to venture beyond the limitations of soft pastel and try my hand a painting with actual paint.

I chose acrylics because of the low odor and fast drying times.  I had no idea, though just how fast acrylic paints dry.  Really, they dry almost too fast for my taste (for those of you who don’t know, think along the lines of 15-30 minutes).  I hear that you can buy extenders that will lengthen the drying time, and I am going to have to hunt those down.

This media is, I fear, going to be a bit of a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, I can (theoretically) mix up any color I want; on the other hand, having an infinite amount of choice could actually inhibit some creativity.  Also, having a severe deficit of color theory knowledge doesn’t help.

All that said, I really enjoyed working with paint, brushes, and canvas board.

I’m fairly pleased with how easily these colors blend, but I have a long way to go figuring out what works best in each situation.

This piece is only 6×6 inches, and even with the harder pastels, it was still tricky to get a nice sharp edge on sanded paper.  More work to do there, too.

One last note: this painting was done from life (a departure from my earlier pastels which were done from photographs).  I built a shadow box this weekend from black foam core, and lit the setup with a small clip-on lamp and a daylight bulb.

I’m a bit depressed about the intensity of the colors in my paintings. I really want to get some nice lively grays, but I am really struggling. I’m beginning to see why some pastel manufacturers sell nearly a thousand different colors. This might get expensive if I don’t get it figured out soon.  Either that, or I may have to find a new medium.

In the meantime, I’m going to go make some color swatches. Yuck.

I’m still trying to get a handle on these soft pastels.  The tooth of the Mi-Tientes paper fills up fast, but a bit of SpectraFix fixative opens things up a bit.  Unfortunately, the pump spray bottle has a tendency to splatter a bit.

This is my first painting on Ingres paper.  I was skeptical when I started, because it is similar in texture to Sennelier that was basically junk.  To my surprise, it took multiple layers of pastel fairly well and and even held up to an alcohol wash.

I’m still struggling with reds, but of all the problems I see with this painting (including a fairly fundamental flaw in perspective), the apples are the least of my concerns.

The season is almost over, though the local grocery stores will continue importing them from some place south of here for a little while longer.  Thought I would capture one so I could daydream until next year.

You’ll probably see these items appear again in future drawings.

I drew these eggs last night as part of my homework.  This week was our second class, and the topic was shading.  We spent the bulk of the class drawing white objects on a white surface.  As boring as that sounds, it turns out to be a great way to learn to see subtle variations of tone; and as you can see, white can actually be pretty darned dark.

My hand-eye coordination still needs some work — the egg on the left is a bit misshapen.  But I feel like I am improving even after just a couple of weeks of class.  If nothing else, I am becoming much more comfortable with charcoal (check out my previous attempts with charcoal to see what I mean).

I stuck with the Cotman paints and waterbrush just for the sake of seeing whether I could keep things from getting too messy.

The main issue I have with this is that I don’t think I got quite enough contrast.  This has been an issue that I’ve had from the beginning; though I do feel like I’m slowly improving in that regard.