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| 'Summer Symphony' 30x40 pastel ©Karen Margulis |
It was a crazy day.....even for me! There will only be a short blog post and no daily oil painting. It's not that I didn't paint today. I did paint...a lot. And I painted BIG! Once I got started I couldn't stop. I painted four 30x40 pastels today and it was such a high!
The paintings are for a hospital commission. There were specific guidelines and requests for subject matter and color palette. Working this large in pastel is a lot of fun and I imagine you might have questions. So ask away! I will put together a Q & A post on painting large and share more details of these paintings tomorrow.
I was feeling guilty for not doing my little oil painting but I think this adventure makes up for it!
Ask your questions by email or in the comments. karenmargulis at gmail.com
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| All set up with underpaintings finished. |
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| Two finished and time for a lunch break |
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| All one. Jennifur approves! |
9 comments:
Lovely work!
One of the things that impresses me is what seems to be your utter lack of self-doubt. I have been painting a long time in most mediums, and every day I have immense self-doubt and fear when I start a painting for fear of another self-perceived failure. How do you take on a project this big with the full expectation that you will succeed? You are amazing!
Hi Karen, lovely to see beautiful work on a cold English morning.
For the underpainting did you use watercolour and was the work completed on paper?
Thank you for sharing your work with me.
Regards
Geoff.
ps.. I too flit from oils to pencil to pastel. Oh! to be single-minded.
What kind of lighting do you use for all of those easels? How do you keep the rolled uart flat? I'm always amazed how you pre choose your palette. What inspires your colors and under painting?
Thanks for each and every tip,idea and beautiful painting.
Again, I am curious, are you using uart? I have a roll and I've tried the slight wetting and pressing technique which worked erratically. Did you glue the grounds to something more stable? Did you submit your ideas to the hospital beforehand.
How do you handle the amount of pastel dust that must be generated doing such large pieces? Did you do small studies of each painting before the large ones? I'm also interested in hearing about the paper that you used? Will you be framing them or the client? Spectacular pieces—just lovely! Thank you for your willingness to share your knowledge and expertise!
I love these works and the way your paintings always seem so effortless! What medium do you use for the underpainting?
Karen, do you have any tips on flattening curled Uart paper? I just unpacked some of my supplies today sorting what goes in storage from what gets used now, when I found it was curled up from conditions on the trip. I was unhappily surprised by how much it curled, the whole stack did.
Love the big pastels! That is a glorious project. I can see it helped doing them all with the same palette and time of day, atmospheric conditions. I was a little surprised at the palette, it didn't look like your other works - then you mentioned client specified palette and that made sense. That's a challenge in itself! Lovely dawns!
Beautiful!! I love the peaceful settings and palette, so lovely! Thank you for being so generous with your knowledge and process. You are quite an inspiration! My questions:
How do you store larger finished pastel paintings?
Is there a board behind the work on the easel, what kind? How is it temporarily mounted to that surface?
How are the finished pieces mounted and framed? How does it differ from smaller pieces?
How do you transport unframed larger pastel paintings?
How do you send unframed larger pastels in the mail?
Thanks again. And congratulations on the hospital commission! I love original hospital artwork. It's always like a bright ray of sunshine on a dark day! Thank you for seeing this as a great place to display your work and bless others.
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