Messing around

So I took the two pastels that I worked on yesterday, neither of which I liked all that well, and decided to mess with them this morning. Why not? It’s only paper.

Here are the two as I left them yesterday:

 

I didn’t care for either of them very much. They’re both done on white cold press watercolor paper, which is pretty lumpy. Lumpiness is not a problem for me, usually. I like texture in my drawings. The second one had a lot of watercolor paint already on it, which was also not a problem for me. I liked the blue and purple and just drew right over it, first with a sharpie and then with pastels.  I wasn’t crazy about them, though, so this morning I thought I’d do a little experimenting (insert maniacal laughter here).

The first one I painted with mineral spirits, smushing the pastels into the watercolor paper, giving it a thorough once over with a stiff paintbrush. I liked how deep the darks got with the mineral spirits wash. Very pretty.

The second one I used plain water for and basically, all those pastels turned to mud. Not sure why, since they were the exact same colors I used on the first drawing, but there you go. I decided to plow ahead with both. Maybe I’d like them better after I was done playing with them.

5×7″ pastel on watercolor, figures dancing. Click to bid.

 Again, I have to say, I like the first one best (it’s available on ebay). The second one makes me go meh. I wonder if it wasn’t the line drawing on it that made it feel awkward to me? The colors just don’t seem rich enough in comparison to the first, either. Whatever it was, I definitely want to mess around with mineral spirits some more and do some experimenting with wilder and deeper color palettes. One other note, the first of the two, the mineral spirits experiment, melted the glue off the artist tape that I was using to keep the paper on my drawing board. Good substitute for Goo Gone maybe.