Pastel Painting From Alpha to Omega!

Posting WIP photos, as I often do to let you know what I'm up to is fine, but sometimes it's good to view them in relation to the finished work. So let's do just that today.

Lingering on Snowy Banks

In this pastel painting, that nearly monochromatic feeling of a winter's morning was what I wanted to achieve. 

Starting out it is always important to sort out where the horizon goes. Rule of thumb says upper third or lower third of your support. I like the broad swing of the river so I went for upper third!

So here you can see the start. The horizon marked in, I usually use pastel pencil for this. This image relies heavily on perspective, so it's important to find your focal point/ vanishing point, and work around that. In pastel painting you usually block in your lights and darks, so here I am working in my lights.
Having popped in the lights I start moving in with the darks, unfortunately I have deleted the photos so now you can see a close up of the bottom right hand corner, I can really get obsessive about grasses!

This time I decided not to blend everything too smoothly, the strokes of the pastels can clearly be seen. Above is a detail of the reeds, they really were frustrating, I can tell you. Too thick, too thin, too yellow argggh! Even here there are about 15 hues in here and graphite stick, which I used on the trees too to give that skeletal branch look. On the surface the graphite stick gives a nice metallic sheen too.
Sooooooo, there we have it. Still recovering from my OP so I haven't been at the easel, but I'm hoping to wake my pastels from their deep sleep this week, perhaps not with a kiss. However, I am looking forward to getting back to some clarty fingers.