Class Exercise - Pot, Pepper and Onions

Pot, Pepper and Onions.....11 x 14 Pastel on Wallis Belgian Mist Sanded Paper

This one is just about done, I need to tweak a few things, the middle onion is too red, and the background and foreground need a little work. I'll be doing that at home

I will be starting a new project in class next week. What I learned last night is that for me to draw (which I do), I need to have a harder pastel that keeps an edge. I used NuPastel last night which is a very hard pastel made by Prismacolor and was very pleased at what I could do with them. I will be using the NuPastel for my drawing and first layers and then follow up with my very soft Ludwigs.

One of the things we talked about last night, continuing on the Light and Shadow painting concept, was that not everything has to be detailed. Coming from a colored pencil background I have a tendency to render everything at the same level. Deb talked about detailing either the lights or the shadows but not necessarily both. So as I finished up this painting, I thought about detailing the light not the shadow. So, for instance, you can see the dark bottom of the green pepper runs into the cast shadow, but your eye fills in the information.

We're starting to talk about edges...hard and soft....but Deb describes them as pathways. You can open up a pathway by using a soft edge and keep the attention in another part of the painting by using a hard edge. She also uses the word "magic" alot....which I love!

My homework project for this next week is to start a colored pencil piece based on what I have learned in the pastel class so far. Here is the photo I took yesterday to use as a reference. In the pastel class we work from life, but my pepper would be dead and the onions a little crisp if I didn't use a photo reference for colored pencil work....it's soooooo slow.