Finished pastels

Although I'm continuing to work on the roses mentioned earlier, they continue to be incredibly time consuming. I think this is a piece I will have to work on a little bit at a time. I did manage to finish two other pastels in the month of January. The first is an image of Chateau Eza, near Monaco in the South of France. I've never been there myself, but apparently my parentswere in the mid 90s, and I based my painting on one of their photos. It's the first time I've done a painting of a place I've never been to. I think it turned out pretty well, and hopefully the "artistic license" I took wasn't too much.

I was also inspired by a copy of the Pastel Journal purchased recently which included a series of winter scenes. We've had a few snowfalls in January, so I decided to give it a try. The neighbor's barn, which I can see from our front windows, seemed like as good a subject matter as any. And building thick layers of pastel to represent the layers of snow seemed an appropriate technique.