Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Curiosity

I am currently suffering from "Surprise pressie" portraits, which means that although am busy painting the results have to stay under wraps until the surprise is no longer, hence a very frustrating and boring blog!
I've also had a touch of artist's block for a couple of weeks now which is something I hate to admit but it does sometimes get to me, a lovely dog walk this morning seems to have given me a jolt, and provided the inspiration to break the spell :-)

I came home eager to get to work on a painting of a curious cow that was staring at me and the dogs in the early morning sun, the colours in the scene were so wonderful that I was eager to get stuck in with my pastels.

I selected a sheet of Claire Fontaine pastelmat (which I have never used before) and got the shock of my life from the surface adhesion! I want to have a very diffuse/muted background on this painting and was keen to get down and dirty with my smudging BUT it seems that once on this paper the pastel just stays put and smudging is highly unlikely!

Not to be defeated I have changed my tack and am slowly working around the problem by trial and error with some success I need to take a break to rest my eyes but here he is so far .............

2 comments:

Jan said...

After hearing so many good things about PastelMat, I was surprised by the surface also. Will have to do some more painting on it before I make any judgement about it though.

Your sweet cow ended up GREAT! I just think cows are so sweet in real life and in art! Sometimes I wish we still had ours!

pett paintings said...

Thanks Jan ,don't really know what I was expecting of this surface but I know it came as a surprise, I like to move my pastels around a bit too much for this paper so will not be going there again, its all a case of trial and error isn't it.