"tropical delight"

12"x16" unison pastel on Uart 500

Today's painting came to me very spontaneously . You know, when you are just feeling it and you can't stop painting until it's finished. 

I have been admiring palm tree paintings by two artist's that I follow on FB. So when I went off for some vacation time at the beach recently, I couldn't help but photo and study the palm trees.  For the last week I have tried painting them and drawing them in my sketchbook. I wanted to get more familiar with the palm trees before I did a larger painting.  

I recently loaded the Value Viewer app on to my iPad mini. I usually work from my reference photos on the iPad.  What a cool app this is! You look at your photo through the app and it gives you the color photo, a black/white version , a notan and a 3 value version which you adjust. I worked totally from the 3 value black, grey and white version for this painting. 

image on my iPad

 The last two weeks have been about experimenting and pushing myself to try new things. So why not start with a color scheme…. I picked a triad with orange, green and violet. I've had this set of Unison pastels that I have not used so I pulled them out.

Unison starter set 

 Uart 500 sanded paper is my safety paper, I'm familiar with it, so I decided to start with that. I had so much fun at the Richard McKinley underpainting workshop and wanted to practice more with the oil stain underpainting. I knew I wanted the drips of the paint and could get the more intense color with the oil stain.

oil stain underpainting

I told myself to take my time and really think out the underpainting and where i wanted the painting to go.  Excitement - I really liked the way it turned out and wanted to get started on the painting….but I had to let it dry. So I took a break and had some dinner. 

 

I started by laying in the darkest values on the palm fronds. After that I couldn't stop until I finished the painting! This was really fun for me to do, I had picked out the pastel sticks (about 20) in the triad color scheme and the painting came together quickly. I'm going to let it sit on my easel for the night so that I can look at it in the natural light in the morning and make any fine adjustments.