COLTISHALL LADIES GROUP

Last Thursday we restarted our Coltishall Ladies weekly group and two of us worked with pastels. I had another cyclamen plant in full bloom and it seemed a good subject to play with lots of colour.



Drawn in briefly with a cream coloured pastel pencil on an almost gold coloured 360 g/ms sheet from my Clairefontaine Pastelmat 30 x 40 cms pad with interspersed wax paper to protect each work from smudging, I then used my box of 72 soft Ashby pastels. At the end I used a natural sponge to wet over the background to see if it helped the main image come forward. Not sure it made much difference!!

Of course, I think you could say its not really finished as a piece of artwork but what I achieved in the afternoon involving tea, cakes and lots and lots of chat catching up on each others' news.

PASTELS

Sorry, not visited your blogs of late - have been so so busy with art and family. Now have my brother and wife staying with us for a week and today after visiting our village pub by the river for a carvery lunch, the men watched the (recorded) grand prix and Gaynor and I sat in the sun room. Ha, Ha - wherever is the sun nowadays.

Gaynor was knitting for friends new baby so I got out my pastel set and began to sketch the flower arrangement that includes some of our pink hydrangeas from the garden. Gaynor says it took hour and a half from start to finish. Quite gentle and a most enjoyable time, especially as I have not painted for ages.

As I have posted this floral pastel, thought I would add the early stages (as far as I got) of another pastel sketch. This time of a section of my garden when my ladies came for our summer garden sketch day together. Nowhere near finished of course.

Ron and Gaynor are going home on Thursday and then I go off to Sandra's cottage by the sea for a sketching weekend together. Hopefully will have something worthwile to post when I get back.

PASTEL WORKSHOP

two works in progress (plus the inevitable cups of tea)

Way back at the beginning of May I had a pastel workshop with my regular artists, but realised this morning that due to so much dashing about I had not posted info about our day together here in Coltishall village hall. It seems (thank goodness for my routine) I had put the photos I had taken onto my hard drive Coltishall workshop folder, so it was easy to find them.

I took many brightly coloured subjects and one of our kind ladies brought some new interesting figures and pots. So here are a some photos of the subjects they all chose from - I loved them so much I wanted to join in and in fact took photos for use in my studio when I get the time:

dancer, pansies and lace - blue plate, orange and vase of flowers

floral portion of our mixed subjects for a pastel workshop.

The morning began a little different than most of my workshops, as we plunged straight into a full subject learning as we went. Here are some works in progress (as well as the photo at the top):

... and here are some floral works :

I could not get all the variety of work into this post, but must mention our young lady's work on the Venetian mask Maggie kindly brought in for us. It would also seem we got so involved I did not photo the finished work at the end of the day and I know there was a delightful study of the ballerina with flowers as well as the one above with the lamp . Naughty tutor!!

PS: I have had real trouble with this post - with uploading the images and now with this massive space before the comments and other details - it won't let me delete blank lines all the way down!!!! I've given up trying so keep going if you want to add a comment please!!

I've been in to get rid of the blank lines this morning, hurrah it worked today!!