Work Placement - Week 3: Clouds, Shadows & that Elusive Pastel

Holy moly! Where to start? After a 2-week break (with the Australia Day Public Holiday somewhere in the middle), I returned to my placement feeling slightly overwhelmed with the task ahead of me. I wonder if any fellow artists out there can resonate with this: have you ever undertaken something new, and started having dreams about how you're going to achieve a certain outcome? Well, this was me over the last week. I have been picturing my painting - knowing that the next step will be filling in that wide, expansive background with clouds. And I love clouds! And I want this project to be fun...however my perfectionist brain started to overthink the process and I started having lucid dreams of 50 shades of grey and white. In my dreams, these clouds were beautiful and fluffy - layer upon layer of pastel, puffed up with sunlight.

But these clouds mocked me - they said they were special and couldn't be replicated. How disheartening!

In the real world, I knew I could create something. I was visualising it in my mind - and then I remembered my task from Week 2...I didn't have the right pastel colours for what I wanted to achieve. Thankyou to my lucid dreams for inadvertantly reminding me to get my shit together!

One trip to Oxlades later, and I had a goody bag filled with beautiful greys and whites.

A combination of Art Spectrum and Mount Vision Soft Pastels

I spent Week 3 of my placement mapping out my cloud coverage. Keep in mind, clouds are 3D, so there is going to be alot of layers, blending and shadows. This is the beginning of transforming a 2D painting, into something that pops. I'm looking forward to seeing the results!

Argh! This was messy. I was starting to feel very conscious of my work when this photo was taken.

Another photo - I think I lost myself a little bit at this stage and was just trying to map out the cloud coverage. I took a bit of a break after a while and came back with fresh eyes.

This was the afternoon's progress. First layer of cloud cover down. At this point I was using a light grey pastel and blending it in with the blue background. This was the start of creating shadows.