Painting People

I've been putting off, for too long several painting ideas floating around in my head (& in my photo collection), so this week, because of another artist's challenge I decided to just set aside my in-progress paintings and just DO IT! Here is the first painting. I'm hoping to start a 2nd later this week.


This shows the initial pastel pencil drawing on a reclaimed canvas & a couple of close-ups of the drawing. The previous plein air painting still shows through the drawing, but will be covered by pastel eventually, with maybe bits showing through for textural effects. (right clicking on the image, then clicking "open link in new window" or "open link in new tab" will make the image larger if you want to see it closer...)

After the first layer of pastel:


I then sprayed the canvas with diluted pva size to "glue" the pastel on. I like to take a photo before spraying, paranoid the spray will ruin the painting! Luckily, that didn't happen - although since the spray hadn't been used for a while, it was clogged and needed to be changed. Meanwhile I used a different spray bottle which didn't cover as well and spit large drops! I've since corrected these issues...

Here a photo showing the 2nd layer of pastel---


I'm very grateful to my friends that helped make this painting possible: letting me take the reference photo with such a lovely model in this beautiful setting! I'm hoping this will be the first of many people paintings, and more models (hint, hint) will step forward to be included in this series! Thanks m'dears!!

Off I go to paint some more - hoping to finish this one this weekend!