Oak Byway – Pastel by Karen Winters

Oak Byway – 11.5″ x 9″ – pastel on paper

After working almost exclusively in oil for the past year (with a few sidetrips into watercolor,) I felt like taking out my pastels for a little experimentation. I’m going to be doing a larger pastel painting in the near future, so this is a bit of a warmup.

No matter what the medium, some things remain the same: color, shape, value, composition, edge definition, stroke, perspective and techniques like negative painting. It’s different holding a stick of pigment between one’s fingers rather than wielding a brush, but much of the experience is quite similar to oil painting. In this project I started with a coffee colored paper which you can see peeking through here and there. I selected the paper to provide a mid-tone starting point for the large tree mass.