Plein Air Sedona

This is one of the 3, 5x7 oils I painted set up along the hiking trail. I rather like the close up view of the different greens in the shrubs with just a few of the red rocks in front. This is called Lush Greens painted quickly as it was getting late afternoon and I and my painting friends had been at it all day.

Plein Air Painting in Sedona

This little gem(5x7) , Happy Cactus was painted on location on a very windy day. I decided to paint 3 small oils while set up along the path that descended to the river where I previously painted in the morning.

I loved the wild flowers that were at the place where I set up for Happy Cactus. I wanted to paint some thing bold and colorful and as I am sometimes too lazy to pack up and move to another place to paint this suited me just fine. I call this Brilliant Yellows.

Plein Air Painting in Sedona

This is one of my painting that I did at Oak Creek Park in Sedona. After painting rocks for several days in Oils it was fun to switch to pastels and paint a structure. This is the old historic water wheel used to irrigate fruit trees and crops in days gone by.

Caran D'Ache Underpainting For Pastel Paintings

This is my Photo Reference that I will be using for this segment of my blog which is Titled : Using Caran D'Ache watercolor crayons for under painting a pastel painting.

Photo taken: North Myrtle Beach Nature Preserve.

Pastel Paintings Underpainted with Caran D'Ache Watercolors

Here is my set of watercolor crayons. I originally purchased them years ago to use on a 5 week studies abroad program. I thought they would be great for quick sketch studies but did not use them a whole lot. I did make a monotype with them but my fields of study were stone lithography and bronze casting.
You know us artists, we never get rid of art supplies as we will eventually use them. I have played around with them but decided to use them for a watercolor under painting for some small pastels. These can be used opaquely or thinly as you would generally think of a watercolor painting.

I use them a bit differently. I peal the paper back and dip the crayon in water and then paint with them directly onto the paper without a brush. You have to constantly dip them in water but it works well and I don't have to rinse out a brush. You can layer colors as well as mix them to create new colors on the paper. I am having fun with this and hope that you will give it a try as well. This will also work well for Plein Air Painting, all I need to tone my paper is these crayons, a container, and water. Simple!!

Hope you enjoy my small paintings that follow.

Caran D'ache Underpainting Only

Here is just the under painting of Caran D'
Ache watercolor crayons. It was done on a piece of Wallis that was already toned red ( A bit redundant) I think the under painting would work best on the white Wallis paper or the Buff U-Art paper. But I had this piece already cut to size and wanted to dive right in and not waste time cutting more paper. The size for all these small paintings measures 6x6 inches.
It is amazing what you can do with a small set of these watercolor crayons. I have done a few others and like them even without going over them with pastel.

Nocturne with underpainted economy

I decided to try and paint the image as a nocturne. I used Art Spectrum Paper in the sienna color. As you can see the texture of the paper is considerably different then the Wallis paper in the images that follow. I added water to front of the marsh as it appeared to work best for this night version. I did very little under painting on this one. Kept the color scheme in the purple/blues with the compliment of orange.