Tom's Workshop

To show you the basic idea of the pastel workshop, I thought I'd show you Tom Christopher's work  - how his paintings progressed, and then show you my first attempt.
  After roughly sketching his landscape, Tom sprayed his Uart paper and applied a very loose watercolor under-painting. 
Next he began applying soft/light strokes of value - not necessarily color. Using values, he set up his painting from darks to lights and warms to cools. He added layer upon layer - all very lightly and loosely, eventually adding in some detail, but very little detail. He kept his paintings loose - almost abstract. This is not his finished piece, but close to it. After he sent us off to start our paintings, he did work a bit more on this. Jo bought this demo - very nice.  You should click on the first pic above and then click through the photos to better see the progression of the painting. 

Then I started mine using the same under-painting watercolor technique and then adding value with pastels. It was difficult to get away from wanting to match colors. From my college days, I have well understood the idea of values vs. color, but Tom's technique held off on the local color until well into the painting.  Of course, I painted-to-death this first painting. Although it needs lots of help, which I can do, it was a learning experience. I moved on and did the paintings that I posted yesterday.
I started this last painting on the last day. It, too, needs some work, but I kind of liked it. In Tom's critique he said several times how he liked the lower left corner - liked what was going on - very abstract. I'm not sure I saw that, but I will try not to mess up the corner, and still work on the over-all painting.

I have another series of photos of a different Tom Christopher painting to show his technique again - if anyone is interested. It is cool to see the progression.  Jo had a drawing app on her Ipad that showed the process of her drawings- she had all the cool toys!