The Magical Hour, pastel, 14 x 11

underpainting for The Magical Hour

In my pastel class yesterday we spent some time on underpaintings. As I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, I normally do monochromatic/value underpaintings, but sometimes I like to start things off with more color. My Thursday class didn't meet today, so I had the day to be more experimental on my own work. Wanting to have some more fun with an underpainting, I pulled out a photo from a spot in Hilton Head where I painted on location a couple of months ago. The boats in the scene were brightly lit from the sun setting and hitting them just right, so I wanted to set that up in the underpainting by starting with some bright warms in the sunlit areas, and repeating them in the sky and where they were reflected in the water. I contrasted cool colors against the warms and kept the whole underpainting pretty simple. I took my time with the rest of the painting, balancing the warms and cools, rendering a bit more details than I'm used to, and playing with color. Boats aren't my typical subject matter, but I sure had fun painting these!