Immersed in Water

Dancing on Water, pastel, 9x12

In my Wednesday and Thursday pastel classes, our focus for the next couple of weeks will be water and water reflections. I found a reference photo that I thought would make a great study for colorful water reflections. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. You'll notice in the reference photo below that there's a brilliant blue reflection that I thought would make for some wonderful, colorful reflections to paint.

reference photo

Often what makes for a beautiful, interesting photo, doesn't always translate well into good artwork. After some struggle with my demo (on both days!) I realized that focusing too much attention on the big blue mass in the lower half made the painting bottom heavy and split the composition into two unrelated sections. The blue reflection as it appeared in the photo just didn't seem to translate well as artwork when I tried to copy what I saw. So that's where artistic interpretation had to step in and work the same excitement from the brilliant reflection into a logical composition, and also work with the established color palette.

Dancing on Water is my demo from my Thursday class.