CREATING ART THE AMATEUR WAY

My second painting (is it painting or drawing? I'll call it painting) using Neopastels by Caran D'ache is of a leafy autumn avenue and was relatively easy.  One of my favourite abstract artists is Leonid Afremov and although he is no longer with us, he leaves behind a legacy of the most innovative of styles. His work is recognisable immediately and he has many aspiring artists worldwide trying to emulate that style.  I didn't even try but I remember his fearless use of colour and so my leafy avenue has purples and blues and mauves that aren't really representative of autumn.  I started with the black for the trees and for this I used a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist pen with a chisel 'nib'. I knew that I wanted the light to come from the end of the road and that is pretty much it. Again, as with the first Neopastel painting I did, I used Sansodol solvent to make the pastels spread (Caran D'ache Neopastels are not as mushy as some brands, and some colours among t...

I always like to learn new things and I don't think I have ever used pastels before, not even as a child. These aren't the dusty ones, though, but the Caran D'ache 'Neopastel' oil pastels. I wanted to experiment and learn as much as I could in one go and I created this on the back page of a brand new Strathmore Mixed Media journal because if it turned out to be an eyesore, I didn't want it to be the first thing I saw when I opened the journal!   I started off without a plan and started stroking the pastels across the bottom of the page, changing colour as I went upwards, still with no idea. When I got to the top, it was then that I got a vague idea for a painting. The good thing about oil pastels is that you can go straight over the top of a previous colour and obliterate it. I hid the top of the painting (which was reds and oranges) with blacks and greys and a bit of blue.  The Neopastels had shown up the slight graininess in the Mixed Media paper and I didn...