Torres Del Paine National Park

The subject matter is a scene form a National park in Chile that’s been on my to do list for two or three years.  I wanted to a landscape using a similar technique to that behind Sarah Ann a couple of days ago, using lots of pastel colours to create neutrals but with yellows, blues and greens being still visible and there being a lot of energy to the painting.  So a rocky scene was always going to be the subject.

And I followed all my usual pastel techniques.  Pencil drawing first, the applying all the pastels before mixing them together with fingers and colour shapers.  In a small deviation from usual, a lot of the initial pastel marks were stripes rather than dots, which made sense for this scene.

After my first attempt, which resulted in an acceptable painting, I stopped to think about what else I could do with it.  This is the great thing about oil pastels (and presumably oils): tinkering can improve a painting whereas for watercolours and inktense pencils, tinkering can only make things worse.  I’m now beginning to understand those artists who have to be told to down their brushes on the telly – something I’d never need to be told with watercolour, having finished an hour before, but that I can imagine having to be dragged away from my pastels.  Anyway, I did three things, the second and third of which I can imagine doing every time and defining my style:

– I added a little bit of yellow, blue, red and green to the snow in places and smoothed it in

– I darkened the shadows in a few places

– I added reds, blues and yellows to the neutrals but left them to show up as themselves rather than neutralising them

I really like the overall result and this is definitely going up for sale.  Watercolour takes years to master but oil pastels, like inktense pencils, are a medium that seems to make you look like an accomplished artist really quickly.