Pastel Painting Makeover #1 ....Adding Texture

'Deep in the Meadow'          8x10         pastel          ©Karen Margulis
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I didn't want to start from scratch today.  I wanted to paint but I couldn't decide what to paint. I know this is a common affliction. I have so many ideas it is sometimes hard to settle on one. So instead of starting a new project I went to my discard pile.  This is the pile for unfinished, overworked just plain bad paintings. I never get around to throwing them away and many are on good paper and just need to be recycled.

I like to repurpose everything so giving an old painting a new life is a fun challenge. I will share these repurposed paintings in my new blog feature Pastel Painting Makeovers. Here is the first one.

This is an interesting painting. It is on a piece of gatorboard with a homemade grit. I had painted some Queen Anne's Lace but they were not working.  So I used the painting to show a class how to restore tooth on an overworked painting. You can see in the photo that I brushed some areas off. I applied matte medium for texture. I used workable fixative in other areas. But I never got around to painting over it. It was just a sample.

Today I pulled it out and was inspired to rework the flowers using a different color palette. I decided to have the blooms emerging from a dark background with some warm light bouncing around them. I wanted a change from the greens and sometimes these flowers look this way in late summer.

I like how the texture of the matte medium and fixative helped create a 3D effect on the flowers and parts of the background. I will be trying this again!