Day 9: The Sky IS Falling

from January 9, 2012

Ribbons, a soft pastel on Wallis paper

1. I whipped up this quick starter sketch with vine charcoal during our monthly pastel group meeting.

2. I began blocking in the main shapes with NuPastels.

3. In this step, the main contours are completely blocked in with NuPastels and have been pinky-finger-blended into the tooth of the paper to hide the cream color of the paper.

4. I've had my first major fixative incident with SpectraFix. I had a gooey, spotty area appear in the middle of the sky, and began seeing significant darkening of the image. I'm now wondering how long the shelf life is for the concentrate of the fixative. On the other hand, I kind of like and can live with the kind of spotting that occurred in the foreground (I did cover some of it up). Think, think, think about corrections for the sky...

5. The only real change between Part 4 and this image is that i applied Golden Pastel ground medium by brush to the sky portion of the image and dried it with a hair dryer. I hope that this turns a bad spray incident into a positive learning experience.

6. I was able to repair the sky goobers with the pastel ground medium (WHEW!), which gave me the opportunity to rebuild a gradient sky and then build up for foreground structure and make some adjustments to the near farm buildings. I added some more Everclear (grain alcohol) to my diluted SpectraFix and decided to respray, intentionally going for a spatter-spray effect. Why not learn how to use odd chemistry in a positive way?

7. I needed to use a higher value highlight as using fixative on this piece has progressively darkened more of the colors than I've ever seen, and have opted to NOT spray a final layer of fixative here. While this piece is finished as far as I will take it in this daily painting format, I will work to revisit this composition again later with a fresh batch of fixative. I am pleased that I was able to get some more tooth back on the surface with the acrylic ground for pastels from Golden (I'm counting it as a lifesaver) without losing all of the details underneath the coating (translucent/transparent overcoat).

Today's OOPS art-venture included a "learning experience" that I tried to turn back from an "oh *!" to an "okay, I can fix that" scenario. Essentially my ever-so-reliable SpectraFix fixative seemed to have an excessively gummy-gooey kind of day. This meant as I was trying to do some final blending on my sky, there was a Henny Penny moment where parts of the sky fell off. After initially freaking out, I pulled out my Golden Acrylic Ground for Pastels, painted it over the whole sky area, dried it with my hair dryer, and reapplied a graduated sky. I diluted the SpectraFix with a little more alcohol and decided to use its misbehavior characteristic for the day as part of the picture, opting to let some new spots/granulation to be left in the painting. Today's piece counts a bit more as a learning experience than an awesome finished piece.