Following Flow, From Photo to Pastel Painting

So let’s follow my painting Flow, from first photos to the finished pastel painting. 

Flow, 50cm x 50 cm pastel 

I'll be honest, I'm a little in love with this one and to think it started off with a mix media plein air session which I wasn't too happy with. To start off with I also messed around with some filters on my original reference photo to help me get away from the pure blue/green colours that were there, I find this very helpful when I don’t want to be working on a natural palette. Often I use a black and white filter to get rid of any local colour.

So here is my reference, I decided to concentrate on the bottom left section of the photo. 

It is the sunlight reflecting the blue sky and the branches of the trees with the lily pads that caught my eye here. From the pic I move onto my Sennelier PastelCard and start putting down the basics, moving around the painting to get my lights and darks and rough shapes. 

After initially blocking in my shapes and first values, I felt that the water was looking very murky which wasn't very pleasing although I liked the contrast on the photo, so a splodge of fixative and then I started to work with stronger blues to get some ripples. The ripple effects are done with both soft and hard pastels and pastel pencils, however pastel pencils often give up very little colour on top of softer layers which tends to be frustrating. 

The final round was even more intense blues giving definition to the spaces between the branches reflecting in the water and a couple of dashes of  pinks and turquoise to jazz things up a bit, final little highlights and there it is, Flow.