I've been wanting to take an online art class but I couldn't find any artist whom I thought I'd want to learn from...until I saw Marla's Bagetta's pastel paintings. The funny thing is she's a landscape artist, and landscapes don't even interest me, but her landscapes are bursting with so much light and colour that they grabbed my colour-loving soul. I figured that if I'm going to learn something, I might as well learn something I'm bad at. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So I signed up for her monthly online lessons - my very first art lessons ever in my adult life! There are two lessons each month, and I wasn't expecting much from the first lesson since it was just an introduction, but from two tutorials of simple studies, I drew these:
I was blown away. These are probably the best still life pieces I've ever done, and I somehow managed to do them in the Impressionistic, painterly style that I so love but has thus far eluded me. What sorcery is this? I began to have hope that I might actually be able to get a handle on landscapes after all!
The next lesson was on Gardenscapes. Ah, we're now onto landscapes - my nemesis. She started with a tutorial on a garden sculpture and the second one was a flower garden. I dug into my Spain photo album and found this photo that we took of El Retiro Park in Madrid. Happy, sunny days when we could actually travel!
Thought I was quite clever to find a photo reference that merged both subjects into one. I didn't have white Pastelmat that Marla used, so I used a sand coloured UArt 600 paper instead. Feeling optimistic, I followed Marla's tutorial of starting with a light layer of pastels and alcohol wash to block in the colour. Optimism quickly vanished. It looks utterly horrendous, nothing like Marla's underpainting.
Never mind, added some pastels on top, starting with the green. Trying to keep it loose, but really have no idea what I'm doing. When Marla does it, a mark magically looks like a flower. Mine looks like a blob.
I tried to follow Marla's advice of not focusing on one area too much but working the whole painting at the same time, so there's balance. What I didn't account for was that I tend to lean my hand on the painting when I work so I ended up smudging and muddying bits of it. Bleah.
But the painting did start looking better when I added more colour. Everything was looking very flat, so I started splashing more colour on it - pink in the sky, blue in trees, dark purple in the foreground foliage. I notice that the colours are not as vibrant as Marla's, even though I used the very soft Schminckes and Senneliers. I think the paper might have something to do with it. UArt 600 can't take as many layers as Pastelmat and the colours tend to blend in with surrounding colours instead of leaving a bright mark. This was despite me not doing very much blending at all.
At this point, I thought I was done, but when I stepped back, I felt that it could still do with more colour interest, so I threw on more pinks and purples, my favourite hues. And added the water droplets for the fountain.
And then, the final touches - added more white highlights, some details to the foreground leaves, and I think I'm calling it.
I realise that to my dismay, I had inadvertently moved back to drawing details - it's not as Impressionistic as I would like. But I can safely say this is probably one of my better landscapes, especially when with regards to the foliage and sky. Hopefully with more lessons and practice, I can get to that stage. Will keep posting updates on my lessons!
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