Plein air painting - Study works in soft pastels

" Painting is easy, getting it right is the hard bit." Danny Byrne

Painting outdoors or on location is always a better option as we get to see the true colours of light and shadow. It is a more rewarding and powerful experience. However it is not always possible to create the entire painting on site. Therefore last week when I visited Karnala Bird Sanctuary, I decided to carry my limited palette of pastels in an endeavor to create small pastel studies on Canson paper so that referring to these and the photograph taken on location, I could then create the painting at my workplace.

I managed to create three of them sized 4"X 5.5"each and spent about twenty minutes on each of them. I carried my old photo album which I use to store my "Small study sketches". I find it very convenient to store my works this way as they do not get smudged a lot and sometime later I get to flip through my works for reference.

Three Plein air soft pastel paintings

created on Canson Mi Teintes paper

sized 4"X 5.5"

I have used three different toned papers namely black, beige and twilight. Fortunately this is the advantage of using Canson MT paper. It comes in many different shades. On earlier occasions I have used the orange toned paper for my seascape painting and it worked pretty well.

For a long time now I have only been working on dark toned papers for my forest landscape scenes. Now I am trying to shift to mid tone colours to see if they work out well for some of my artworks.

Being a nature lover I follow a lot of different photographers and their works as it keeps me inspired. I wrote earlier about an eminent photographer Mr Sudhir Shivaram. He is presently in Bharatpur and you can watch his videos and browse through his works on his FACEBOOK page.

Thanks for browsing through my works.