I’ve been trying to do more plain air work, but I am still mostly stuck in my home studio, so I don’t get many reps, and I don’t get many hours. Setting up doesn’t take forever, but 20 minutes here and there really adds up when you only have 3/4 hours 3 times a week, so I am looking for ways to speed up the process. I have a great easel and I like using the casein that I learned about from James Gurney, but I am not super efficient with it, and that is also a point of irritation. Each time I use it, I get better, and that is something that I want to show my kids as they get older, that it takes time and effort to master skills (and each type of paint has required many hours of practice for me to get to the point where I am now, and who knows if “mastery” is even a thing worth pursuing? But efficiency and confidence are important and can be gained by “doing” work, so that’s what I’m after.

I want to make sure I use the time as efficiently as possible too. So I will get some pastels to make sure that even if I can’t cart around a bunch of stuff for oil in the wild, then I will still have access to colors that can help me to capture what I am seeing and then have a better idea of what I want to do when I get back to the studio.

I did three pastel paintings this morning with three varieties of pastels. This first one was of a rock formation and a hot air balloon that my friend Hugh J. Martin sent me a picture of. These were Sargent Arts oil pastels that I got for 2.99. I like them, and I think I’ll try a simpler subject with them next time that will allow me to use the colors in ways that work to their strengths. I did the painting on earth toned paper, and there were a lot of earth tones in the foreground that I had to get creative with.

This one was done with Cray Pas expressionist pastels. It’s a flamingo based on a picture of a flamingo at the Potawatomi Zoo. I think I liked these the best.

This last one was of our firends’ son from our vacation earlier this summer. I disliked the way the lighter colors were so transparent, and then when I finished up, I realized they are water soluble oil pastels. So they’ll be good for something, but they are not good for what I want to do on my plein air outings. I am not sure why I have been so opposed to using these in the wild, but I think it was because I read one time that John Singer Sargent didn’t like them. Which is, of course, an absurd reason not to use them myself.