16 August 2013

Reworking 'Calm at the Lake' pastel landscape

I have been participating in on-line landscape tutorials hosted by landscape painter Johannes Vloothuis for some time now. I feel more confident in my landscapes due to his webinars and can look at some of my older paintings with  more critical eye. As an exercise I have decided to rework one of my old pastel painting 'Calm at the Lake'.
Calm at the lake,
Pastel on sanded card
I liked this when I first painted this and still do to a certain extent, but I can now find several landscape  errors. The painting is on good quality sanded paper so I will scrape off some of the pastel and overpaint.

Things I like about the painting
  1. Colour combination - the purples set of the greens very nicely
  2. The water
  3. Overall design
Items to fix
After studying the painting these are some of the things I want to change.
  1. The sky should be the lightest area in the painting. This sky is light but I feel it is not light enough.
  2. The mass of the mountain is too dark and does not recede enough. It needs to be blended in some places to soften the edges. I will also think about breaking up the mass to give another plane.
  3. This line of background trees is too monotonous and needs to vary in shapes and colour.
  4. Two cloned lollipop trees - need I say more!
  5. The bank needs to be more melodic and not quite so straight lineish (newly invented word)
  6. The reeds block the entry into the painting and are too detailed for the foreground.
  7. Another lollipop tree - I will also move this tree over to the edge and only paint 3/4 of it to add some interest.
 These are the things I see at the moment. As I continue with the painting I may notice/change other things.
I will post the progress tomorrow.

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