Sara Mathewson

Last week was mostly a wash as far as my getting anything finished in the studio. I did finally finish a watercolor yesterday, but can’t post the pic yet as it is a present for my daughter and she reads this blog:)

I’ve been reading a lot about perspective lately on other peoples blogs and wasn’t sure if I was quite “getting” what they were saying. With my florals, perspective is totally different than with my landscapes. I get it now. I was doing a small (5×7) pastel landscape to work out the details like values and composition. Well, of course perspective plays into this. I did a preliminary sketch and seemed to have it right. But, when I then went to sketch it on the pastelbord(I never trace my drawings, maybe I should start doing this), I thought I had it right. Well, I guess I knew it was different than my sketch in my sketchbook, but I didn’t realize how this would affect the whole painting. This painting involves concrete stairs and an iron bridge. Not easy for me. I’m not a mathematician, and so I usually guesstimate on the perspective and let me tell you, this is not such a good thing when you are dealing with stairs and bridges. I really hate to have to measure things out and get it wrong even when doing so, thus the whole guessing thing. I drew the main parts of the painting on this pastelbord and didn’t notice at this time how wrong it looked.  I had to mostly have it finished before I saw that it was all wrong. Funny how that is. I am glad I did it on a small piece of pastelbord. I ended up having to wash out the whole thing. I had already washed out several parts of this painting and had to re do them. Well, now the board is sitting with an abstract under-painting, as the whole thing didn’t quite wash off. I may tackle this project again, but for now it is shelved. I think at this point it is too frustrating for me and too complicated for me to do it justice. Maybe I am wimping out. But, after working on this small painting for several days, I am already tired of it and think that I may not even do it in the future. I did learn quite a few things though, so all is not wasted. Still, it is frustrating to not have anything to show for all of my efforts.  I do know that this is all part of the process, part of the journey.  After all, i wouldn’t really be stretching and growing as an artist without failures along the way.  I am really quite proud of myself for taking up pastel in the first place.  I could have stayed with just watercolors and limited myself to just florals.  But, even though this was my comfort zone, I felt the need to expand my horizons and try new things.  I’m sure loving these pastels.

What new things have you tried lately?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 5:49 am and is filed under Landscape, Painting, Pastel, perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.