How to Recycle an Old Painting

'Marsh After Rain'       16x20        pastel       ©Karen Margulis
purchase painting with Paypal  $225

I have several stacks of old paintings still attached to foam core. I just stack them up. I have 7 years of bad paintings. I need to do something about them. I could use all the foam core not to mention the shelf space.  I could throw them out. More on that tomorrow. But I hate to waste good paper. So I'll recycle them instead.

stacks of old Bad paintings

There are many ways to recycle a pastel. You can cut them up choosing the little gems hidden in the mess. You can collage with them. You can cut them up and make greeting cards. But if the bad painting is on good sanded paper I just like to paint over it.  I might brush it off or wet it down. But today I decided to spray the whole painting  with some workable fixative.

Here is the BEFORE painting.

An older painting probably 6 or 7 years old

This painting was done probably 6 or 7 years ago. I was in my more detailed phase. Notice all of the leaves on the trees. I also tried to paint every blade of marsh grass. Go ahead and click on it to see all the grass! Over all it is just dull and busy. 

It needed to be recycled!

In this photo I have done some work to the sky and tree line. I made the sky brighter and with more energy. I simplified the treeline by lowering them and making two distinct layers of trees. I opened them up with more 'sky holes'.

Next I darkened some of the creek banks with a couple of purple pastels and I altered the direction of the creek with some big broad strokes of sky color. Next I started repainting the grasses using bolder and brighter greens. I didn't paint any blades of grass in this version. Rather I decided to put in fatter strokes of grass color to hint at the grasses.
Finally I went in with some compressed charcoal to emphasize some areas and I added bits of the pink color to move the eye around the painting.
This transformation took about 30 minutes of 'power painting'. I had fun recycling this marsh to be more in line with my new style of Vortex Energy painting. (I just made that up)

Now on to the next one!