Salt Marsh with Egrets, 20″ x 16″, Pastel Premiere “Italian Clay”

Dry hard pastel underpainting

Hello Friends.  It’s been exactly one month since I posted my last painting!  I’ve been in Massachusetts, playing Bach, and doing other things I guess!  But this past weekend John and I spent several days at Prime Hook and Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuges on the Delaware Bay, walking, looking at birds and taking pictures.   It was overcast the entire time, but not pouring as it has been ever since!  This rainy week has been a good time for the studio and I’ve spent three days there with two new paintings to share.  It felt really good to be back in the studio painting, listening to music, and sharing my space with a good friend.

For the first painting, I looked through my available surfaces, and decided to use a mounted sheet of Pastel Premiere “Italian clay”.  I really do like this surface, however, I also really like doing underpaintings.  Using alcohol on top of hard pastel on this toned surface doesn’t work very well (I did an experiment!). So I chose to begin with analogous colors that would be  a little different but not too much, using hard pastel.  I basically wanted to lay in the big shapes before I started with any detail.  I wasn’t sure where I was going with the bottom!  I liked the top, but found the bottom to be a challenge, so I kind of went abstract with the shapes.  Then ended up changing it and having to do some brushing off.  I ended up splitting the bottom layer of greens to allow the eye into the picture and keep it flowing.  Marsh pictures can be awfully stripey!!!

I used pretty soft pastels on over the hard and felt like I was getting a little too cakey at times.  But I was happy enough with the results.

I’m having a show at my church next year titled Shorescapes: Maine to Chincoteague.  I have lots of Massachusetts and a fair number of Maine (despite just selling one), but I needed more from this area.  So I hope to get a few more from this batch of photos.