Pastel over Ink : What I Saw in the Moonlight landscape drawing

 

first time playing with pastel in a good long time, used this paper, Canson Dry Mixed Media Sand Grain natural sand colored paper.   I was trying to catch an effect I saw in the moonlight last night with the shadows of the trees that I couldn't 'see' in plain ink or colored pencil.. it felt 'smudgy'.. which to me meant pastel.

I started out with a bluish-green ink brush to get started washing in shadows - then went over with pastel

 

This is what I wish it had stayed looking like, but the pastel fixative darkens the colors and mattes out the blacks... so I went back with a little bit of brush technical pen ink and darkened back up the blacks

 

finished:

'What I Saw in the Moonlight' - Marie Lamb - November 19, 2021

January Journals #15

So we are now about halfway through January.  I've kept up, mostly - the comic counted as a sketch that day.  This is my attempt again to draw the hill by Byas Road and Macedonia, near McKenzie TN.  This is a summer photograph I found via Google Maps.  It still doesn't have the same perspective that piques my interest - and maybe I'll get out there with a camera one day soon and capture just the right angle - not to mention the red grass that is so stunning right now against the black leafless bark.

Were coming further along on the remodel - hope to be done very soon.  Lots of little details and finish work. 

January Journals sketchbook #6

Ephesus Church and Hwy 77 near Paris, Tennessee
working from memory
will try to work from a photo next time, the frost on the hill and the way the sunlight came over was what I really wanted to capture, but without a color photograph it is hard to get the right colors from memory

journal today:
I want to remember t he way the sun looked over the fields coming down over the hill with the treeline dark and scattered and the sunlight over the frost in the  distance.  How the sun looked coming through red leaves and evergreen on the way to Camden this morning.  Red shining and the green soaking it in, spiky and assured.  All the little bits of rays of light coming in between.

and a challenge to see how your studio is set up at the moment...

I found it a little eerie I didn't mean to set up my paints into a color wheel, but they are.  But as always, my sense of the color wheel is not quite the same as others?  One artist tells me ROYGBIV but I see white into yellow, then of course yellows into greens and blues, and then because the purples are simply mixed, it goes to the reds, and the reds to black... and you can make brown across the table two ways - green and red or purple and yellow.. and then there is orange and blue which is usually a dark umber color or a way to mix gray if done just right.

Drawing

Working a bit more on the little playful landscapes in my sketchbook.  The one on the right is about half-colored in now.. update a bit more when they are further along.  The locations are bits and pieces of mental pictures I have from driving back and forth to work.  There are several farms that have silos like this on the way to Paris, TN.  Mark and I had talked about the possibility of a calendar to be made from a set of these...

My Micron pens arrived in the mail yesterday, and I am looking forward to playing with them in this fashion, as well.