Loosen Up....One Step at a Time

This is the theme for this month's Back to Basics Pastel Class. I am often asked how to achieve a loose painterly look with pastels and is my belief that it actually comes more easily if you have a plan for your painting. That way you can get in your zone and just paint....responding to your painting intuitively. In my classes we often talk about planning the painting by doing thumbnails and value studies, but too often we don't follow through and actually do them! So for this 4 week session we are breaking down the process one step at a time. Last week we chose our reference photos and came up with our concept for the painting. We did several thumbnail sketches and chose our favorites. From this sketch we then did a small value study with markers. Finally we did a pastel monochromatic value study to check our final composition and design. I made a Planning Worksheet to use for these planning steps. It really doesn't take much time to do. I did mine in about 20 minutes but Hopefully it will allow me to paint 'in the zone' because I have already worked out any potential issues. This week we will focus on COLOR and we will be doing color studies from our reference photos. I'll post mine after class meets tomorrow.