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Sunday, April 03, 2016

It's Never Too Late.....Another Painting Redo


'A Quiet Spot'          12x18        pastel        ©Karen Margulis
available $150
You know the feeling. You are working on a painting and it is just not coming together. It is tempting to throw it away and move on to something else. For many this is the only solution. There is no point in being frustrated and if it helps to get rid of the offending painting I'm all for it. However I find I get more out of a painting experience if I power through and try to find a better solution for the painting.

I learn so much by asking myself questions...."I wonder what would happen if this tree was bigger?" 
"what if I made this into a marsh?" I find solutions that I can apply for future paintings. But most importantly I learn that a painting is not precious. I can brush it out and rework it until it makes me happy. 

I came home from sharing pastels with elementary school children with four bad demos.....they weren't meant to be great paintings since I was illustrating certain concepts and the children were telling me what to paint. So they were not paintings I would keep.....but they had the bones for something better!  Today I share the second demo  'redo'.  I am having so much fun!

The demo complete with ducks

Brushed out and lines to show my new concept
I brushed off some of the pastel and drew some lines to indicate the changes I wanted to make. It is Canson Mi-Teintes paper so I decided to spray some workable fixative to give me more tooth. I kept the major tree shapes and added some ground to the foreground area turning the scene into a marsh.

Block in of the redo

Finished!



2 comments:

Kendall Kessler said...

Lovely painting!

robertsloan2art said...

Oh, this is beautiful! I can see why you kept the line of land and water so simple in the demo, they're kids. You placed a line and worked from it. Breaking that up was spectacular and also adding the extra middle ground darker but still distanced trees. Wonderful resulting painting!

So how would you do something like this if you wanted to keep an animal or bird in? Herons and egrets yeah, but a big cat? Or even a barn cat. I'm planning landscapes around here and want to include the cats in them, either subtle and you find it as you explore or important in the focal area. I'm practicing cat gestures again and need to start taking them to pastels!