Baie des Chaleurs

Tonight was a slow night for my pifflechat group, with one friend out celebrating Purim, and another running errands, soI decided to paint a picture. I choose this fromt a photo I took during my trip to Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula in 2oo5, I stopped alongside the road in New Brunswick, as I neared the border I pulled over and took a photo of the Bay of Chaleur, looking across to the Gaspe on the far side. I thought it was an awesome view.

Although I don't think this is an awesome painting, LOL. I could not find my Art Spectrum paper, and did this on a sheet of 12x16 orange Canson, all I could find. Gee, I used to love Canson, but after using Art Spectrum most of the time lately the Canson seemed horrible, and I had to really fight with it. I also found I was sadly lacking in greens in the little set of pastels I had here in the house (most of my pastels are already in the car to go to art class tomorrow).

But just doing something, anything, is good - no matter the result. Because I hated the orange paper I had, and had no idea how it would turn out, I took a few photos along the way - so I'll show you some of the stages this picture went through before I called it quits.

1) A very simple and basic drawing, and just filling in some underlayer colors using the Pan Pasels.

2) A very simple Pan Pastel undercoat on the entire painting.
3) Worked on the sky, clouds, and the distance hills of the Gaspe. Some deeper color to the water. 
4) More work on the water, the building roof, and some of the vegetation. 
So there you go. I have more photos of the stages this went through, but this is enough to give you an idea .I don't know if it's truly "done" but it's done for the night at least.  A shame in some ways - I do *love* this size so much more than the smaller 9x12 Art Spectrum. But I don't like using the larger sheets of Art Spectrum as I have so much wastage. And I've never had much luck using the Art Spectrum ground that you can apply to a surface of your own - it never comes out like the "real thing".

Maybe I just need to start working on Canson more again until I get used to it. I don't like the orange color either - but it was all that was left in the multi-color Canson pad - naturally since I left the icky color until last. :-)