Reworking a Winter Landscape

'Winter Walk'           16x20        pastel       ©Karen Margulis
available $275

I confess. I am not very organized when it comes to keeping track of my older paintings. One of the downfalls of being a daily painter is the number of paintings that accumulate. So in my early days of painting  (10 years ago) I just piled the finished paintings in boxes or if they were large stack them against the wall of my storage room. It really didn't matter because I was painting just for the sake of painting.

I have been having fun uncovering many of these lost daily paintings. Today I found a stack of larger forgotten paintings. Most of them were pretty bad! But there was one done on Pastelbord that caught my eye. It was 16x20 and probably one of my first winter landscapes. It still had potential so I pulled it from the pile.

Here is the original painting done probably 10 years ago:

The original painting from the early days

Since it was on Pastelbord I didn't want to waste it. I decided to revive it with some finishing touches. What I am discovering is that many times a painting is just a few strokes away from being finished. Ten years ago I thought that this one was done. But now I could see that some refinement and addition of spices would make it better. I put it up on my easel and made a few adjustments. Can you spot them?

Here is what I did:

• I made the distant trees lighter and cooler to add more depth to the scene.
• I refreshed the sky adding some pale yellow instead of the pink to make a visual connection between the ground and the sky.
• I refined the trees adding more color and detail. I also added a third small tree.
• I refined the grasses adding more color and more delicate grass marks. (the original ones were to clunky)
• I refreshed the snow and snow shadows and worked more snow into the grassy areas.