Day 29: Japanese Garden

from January 29, 2012

Japanese Garden, a soft pastel on 8x10 sage-colored Sabretooth sanded and textured surface.

1. I decided to challenge myself again with the Sabretooth surface. The focal point of my piece is the Pagoda statue, but the three groomed bushes in the foreground became my supporting players throughout the composition.

2. I added the pathway in the background to bring the viewers following the deep shadows back into the piece, and continued building the 3D structures of the statue and the triplet of bushes.

3. I used by silicone blender to push the pastel into the crevices of the paper. In many ways, this turns everything thus far in the painting back inot an underpainting.

4. Time to bring in the highlights, enrich the shadows, and fine-tune the needle details on the piney juniper tree. I added reddish shadows on the top of the triplet bushes, fully intending to adjust them in the next layer.

5. This is the final piece, with a new spattering of highlights on the bush trio and the foreground stones. Ultimately I had forgotten the shadow that would be cast by the juniper tree. While this piece looks fantabulous from across the room as the colors blend, the broken color formed by the pitted surface is still NOT my favorite surface on which to work. On the other hand, using the near-perfect groomed foliage in a Japanese garden allowed me to work on creating wonderful ovoids and their shadows.