Pastel poppies...

...I did this from a picture someone gave me. It was the photo on the front of a card she had been given. She had tried to do a pastel from it but she said it had not worked out...and asked me to have a try.

I am not sure if it is a sunrise or sunset. But I had a go. The sun was near impossible to do with those rays. I was making a mess of my pastel but then I took a photo of the card and made it black&white...noir I chose, and looking at this instead of the colour photo I was able to improve my pastel a lot.

I suppose it gives you the lights and darks and you can translate that better to your painting than when you use a colour photo. Then there came a point when I couldn't add much more pastel, so I stopped. It is not perfect, I could do better, but I want to go on to a new picture.

This was done with a cheap set of Inscribe Pastels (after the mice in the garage ate/chewed through my expensive pastels and lined their nest with them). I will be building my collection of good pastels bit by bit again. Just ordered a variety of whites...then I have my eye on some purples...then looking at dark greens - Unison do some lovely dark greens.

I think possibly a New Year's resolution is going to be doing a picture/drawing/painting a day. I need to get back to writing too...