Necla in Pastel

t the moment I try to do some portraits. The most difficult part of portrait painting for me is to reach the similarity to the person you are painting. You can read about the general outline of faces and figures, you can draw the outline of the faces and still do not get the similarity you want. To my opinion the most important features of a portrait and the similarity is to get the light and shadows in a face right. If these are correct you can identify the person.

These paintings were done on watercolor paper. After sketching the outlines I did a watercolor underpainting of the subjects. This underpainting gives a general color scheme to establish the mood of the picture. After the color was dry again I continued with the application of pastel and followed the value scheme of the underpainting. In this way you still have the possibility to change the colors the way you want.

Thunderstorm coming

This painting relies very much on the presentation of the thunderstorm cloud. This could be done nicely in oil or acrylics, but at the moment i am interested in pastel painting and tried to capture the mood of the coming thunderstorm in this work. The landscape is around Munich and I personally experienced this thunderstorm during a bike ride. To remember the scene, I took a photo with my smart phone camera and altered the scene to give a nice composition.

Pastel paintings

After many month of watercolor painting, I thought I had to do something different. Changing the medium gives you a fresh momentum and gets you out of your routine. You have to learn a lot about the new technique. It starts by selecting the right paper and also important the color of the paper for creating harmony or contrast. The paintings shown above are done on Canson tinted paper. The pastels I used are Pan pastel, Jaxon Soft pastels and Van Gogh semi soft pastels for making lines and smaller marks. The advantage of this technique, you do not need any brushes and take care of drying time for color and brushes. You can stop painting any time and resume as often as you like. The only thing you have to do is wash your hands. The disadvantage of this technique to my opinion is the dust you produce by applying the color to the paper. You have to protect the ground, since a lot of pigment follows gravity and collects on the ground. Since the dust is very fine there is also a danger to breath it in. Pastel painters sometimes use a mask for protection and gloves for blending. But the colors are very bright and the method is like drawing. If something is not as you like, you can easily change things later.

Shanghai

This is a picture of Shanghai and I found the contrast of the modern glass buildings and the old chinese wooden building fascinating. It realy shows how China is entering the modern world and there symbols. Since there were so many details to paint i did this painting on a full sheet of watercolor paper from Fabriano. There were no big washes to do mainly detail work, so 300 gr paper was good enough.

Lucca Streetscene

This is another painting done from the sketches I did during our last stay in Lucca Toscana. The sun was very bright and cast sharp shadows on the walls in the narrow streets. The brightest spot in this painting is the direct sunlight on the street and the building on the left side. This difference between the bright sunlight and the dark shadows is the mood I tried to capture in this painting. It was done on Hahnemühle 600 gr rough paper in the size of 38x56cm.

Lucca backyard

This year we went to Lucca Italy once more and I wanted to make several sketches in the beautiful old medival town. We rented an apartment directly in the pedestrian area of the city near piazza bernadini. The weather in the beginning was quite rainy, so I made a sketch out of the living room window looking at the small piazza. From my memory and the drawing from my sketchbook I produced the above painting pretending it was a sunny cloudless day. The painting was done on Arches 300gr rough paper in the size of 36x48cm. Shown is also the drawing from my sketchbook.