Watercolor Ravello Walkway

Watercolor of a walkway down the mountain in Ravello on the Amalfi coast...stay tuned for a newer and more finished version soon!

Big Gray and Little Red

Big Gray Rooster and Little Red Hen,

Hello to our farmer friends, Ernie & Barbara!

We loved the poem!

Pastel Workshop Studies

Top - Red River, NM Footbridge

Bottom Left - Flower Truck in Rome      Bottom Right - Ravello Pathway

This past week I attended Alan Flattmann's pastel workshop in Clute, Texas at the Brazosport Center for the Arts - a wonderful facility! The Southeast Pastel Society sponsored the workshop and Mr Flattmann was the judge for their winter pastel show. 

I enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of my friends, Terry and Harry, at their home in Sugar Land - sat by the fire each evening visiting and eating delicious dinners and drinking wine. It was a great treat for me to stay with them.

Alan gave me some new approaches to pastel work. We freehanded our picture layout which accounts for some of the difficulties that I had with perspective on my studies. Then the first day, we laid in the values in willow charcoal (important not to use compressed charcoal, it is too dark), really establishing the dark and medium values and leaving the light areas free of charcoal. Then we set the charcoal with fixative before starting on the pastel work. Since the darks and mediums were already established in charcoal, we began the pastel work with lights working into the mediums then the darks, the pastel went right over the charcoal without smearing or darkening the pastels. After spraying with fixative again then we began to add details. 

The second day was a similar approach but used sienna pastel pencil and  the side of  a sienna pastel to lay out our painting and establishing the values, then fixing and going into the pastel work, again starting with the light colors and working into the darks.

I will work on turning the Red River and Ravello studies into finished paintings but the flower truck is a study to do paintings for a larger pastel and also a watercolor painting. I have some perspective problems to work on with it but with more than 30 minutes to lay in the basics, it will be easier to get it laid out correctly.

Great workshop, wonderful facility, good teacher. I picked up two of Mr Flattmann's books that I look forward to diving into. Mr Flattmann is leading a painting trip to New England this summer and to Croatia in the fall. He is from New Orleans, view some of his work on his website:

http://alanflattmann.com/