The Importance of Sprinkles

'Summertime in Maine'          8x10         pastel         ©Karen Margulis
available $150 

 What would we do without sprinkles? Cupcakes would be boring for one thing. Ice-cream would be missing something. Sprinkles add the finishing touch to dessert.

A painting needs sprinkles too.

 I am preparing for a pastel demo for a local elementary school and was trying to find a way to describe the painting process in terms they could relate to. The cupcake and sprinkle analogy makes a lot of sense and not just for children! Today's painting illustrates this idea perfectly.

the painting before the finishing touches

I uncovered this older painting when searching for a painting of Maine for a collector. It was a nice concept and I enjoyed the colors but it was lacking something. The values seemed good and I didn't mind the composition so what was wrong? It was like a nice piece of cake but it wasn't very appealing. It lacked the frosting and the sprinkles. The frosting was needed to add contrast and the sprinkles were needed to bring the painting to life!

Often we stop painting just short of adding the sprinkles. We end up with a nice cupcake but we could make it even better with some well placed sprinkles.

To make this painting come to life I started at the top and added fresh pastel to the sky. I used a lighter green applied with a heavier hand to push the distant grass back. I used heavier marks for my final marks. Next I sprayed fixative on the foreground to darken it. I added more intense blues and purples to the Lupines so that they stood out from the grass. Finally I added a vibrant green to the grass where I wanted the viewer's eye to go.

Now scroll back up to the newly decorated painting. I love adding the sprinkles to a painting!

Stage two...darken the foreground before adding sprinkles