Speaking of Art Blog

A Slice of Summer, pastel, 7 x 14"

This is my latest pastel.  It’s of some yellow daisies known as Tall Coreopsis that were blowing in a gentle summer breeze in a prairie near our home in northern Indiana.  I love hiking through that prairie and seeing it change as the seasons turn.  These particular daisies are very long and lanky.  Their stems grow up to 7 ft tall by August.  So when the wind picks up, they bend and bow in submission with their soft petals fluttering their multiple shades of yellow at the very tops of their long legs.

When I contemplated creating this cropped slice of my original photo, I thought about what I could use to unify all those tiny yellow petals.  That’s a lot of little bitty shapes.  I studied my original pic, but I also went back and looked at all the pics I took that day while I hiked through the prairie.  And that’s when I noticed the Ironweed in some of my other pics.  Ironweed has a distinctive brilliant red-violet color that shouts at you even from a distance.  I realized that there were hints of Ironweed in the distance in my original daisy photo.  Aha, that is the color I could use in the background to pull my whole piece together. 

As I worked on the piece I added slightly broken lines of red-violet and royal blue across the whole picture plane right at the base of the distant tree line, to represent the brilliant line of Ironweed.  Perfect.  Not only did it pull all those yellow petals together to make them work as one group, but those two fuzzy edged colors in the distance also served to shove the tree line back and create more depth.  Since so much else in the whole scene is green, those two colors across the middle served to differentiate the close warm greens from the distant darker greens.

One final note is that I made sure to break up that line in the back so that it wasn’t level all the way across.  I varied the top as well as the bottom of those two colors to make them look natural, not contrived.  In other words, a level, perfectly straight horizon line of color back there would have killed the whole effect.  It’s not water, it’s grass and flowers and brush, so unevenness was my goal.

This is why I almost always take my own reference photos for using to create my paintings.  I remember so much more of what I saw by experiencing the place myself.  In this case it was the Ironweed that added that beautiful unifying red-violet color in the distance.  The Ironweed showcases the fluttering daisies perfectly and supports them as they dance as one unit in the summer breeze.  My summer scene is authentic, realistic, and unified.  Artwork complete.