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  Down East Sunset, page 1

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Pastel Demo
sunset sketch
Crayon sketch of the sunset. When I decided to turn this sketch into a painting, I felt the composition would be more interesting in a vertical format, and chose the area inside the rectangle.
During a trip to my family's summer home in Maine, my dad suggested a drive around to the "back shore," or ocean-side, of the island. The time was just after sunset on a rather bleary day, and I was struck by the muted but many-hued colors of the sky and water. The next morning I did this sketch from memory, using the only art tools available to me at the time, a box of wax crayons and some orange construction paper.

After some thought I added one of the many sailboats which cruise up and down the bay.

Back home in my studio, I stared at and thought about this sketch for awhile, and finally decided it appealed to me as the subject for a pastel painting. For Christmas I had been given several sheets of velour, a surface similar in feel to velvet, but I hadn't worked on it yet. I thought this simple image would be a good opportunity to try it out.

I "cropped" the image by drawing in a new margin (see above) and was ready to begin.

 
I started by sketching the horizon and sailboat.
sunset1
Normally I like to use a "hard" pastel for my preliminary sketch, but in this case it didn't make much of a mark on the velour, so I used a soft "Rembrandt" pastel. (The velour itself is light gray.)
  Next I "blocked in" the major color areas.
sunset2
I laid some pale pink into the foreground water, because I wanted pink, rather than the gray of the paper, to show through as a highlight when I laid down the darker blues and purples.
  Then I began layering and blending colors.
sunset3
At first I laid in parallel strokes with the tips of my pastels. However, I soon realized I wanted a more "active" surface, and I switched to using the sides of the pastels, intentionally changing the length and direction of my marks after every 2-3 strokes. In this foto you can still see the slanting "directional" strokes in the water, and the later "broken color" in the sky.
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