Plein Air Sketching, Time to Hit the Road Again

After the greyest winter in 70 years (yes, that's official) the sun finally came out for more than 20 minutes and it was time to saddle my trusty steed and hit the road for some plein air! The desire to get out probably also had to do with the sun also showing up all those dusty corners and streaky windows that you normally can ignore! 

It was 4 degrees C but warmly wrapped, it was down to my little canal, you know the one I always head off to and where I could paint forever! 

This is where my paintings start, I'm not the kind of artist that has fantastic ideas in their heads and can just paint, I need a starting point although a lot of my painting is done in my head. This scene caught my eye while out cycling at twilight and so the final painting will not look like this, it will be a different mood entirely, but getting down to sketching sorts out all of those problem zones that then won't be a problem (hopefully) when I get onto the real thing. 

This piece is going to be low-key, although personally I usually go for a little more drama, I want to put the stream in focus and not really the trees and sky, well that is the clever plan. Sketching the scene is to help me ''see'' what's going on in the dark areas on the right for example. I don't really want a dark blob on the right, but in my reference photo that is what I am seeing. 

This part of the “Quer Kanal” is my happy place, although I've always wondered why it was there, an arm of a major canal, that didn't seem to make any sense but ...... ta da, I parked my bike against a post and there was a little sign with a couple of facts. Where I live are a lot of peat bogs and this part of the canal system was built in 1739 to transport the cut peat into Oldenburg where it was used for heating. 

Back in the studio it was time to get the show on the road, and this is where I'm at today. 

With lilacs and purples I'm trying to get that moody, twilight touch, remains to be seen if it stays that way! 

As a pastel artist you are reliant on the weather as pastel and rain is not a good combination, I work from reference photos (my own of course) but a photo seldom shows a scene the way you saw it, cameras flatten scenes and light and that is why I usually always sketch too, getting my brain racing ahead before I even put pastel to paper. Even then sometimes problems arise, so I'll often head off to check my motif out again.

Seeing, looking, feeling even smelling, art involves all of your senses, well perhaps not tasting ...... I have yet to start eating the grasses around me so that I can paint them better, but I have had the odd glass of paint water and sucked on the odd paintbrush!