Bellevue Arts Festival and Marla Baggetta

Super excited about meeting my favorite artist, I decided to walk by who knows how many booths of the Bellevue Arts Festival to find Marla Baggetta. The goal was to get to meet her and of course buy one of her paintings! yeah, go Ale! ...

This fair has gotten big - I was telling myself - as I walked and walked almost about thru all of it and when I started getting kinda dizzy (didnt have water with me ha) I saw it. The beautiful paintings that I had only seen online or in the form of prints were there in front of me. Marla was not there at first but I met Mike Baggetta - another great artist- and chose one of her crazy awesome pieces.

After a while I got to meet her. She has a great smile all the time and she is very warm. She remembered me from facebook! (see she doesnt have just 200 friends there ha).

This is a picture I took with my shaky hands - I was a bit excited.

the one on the left side of the picture is the one.
I stop many times of the day in my living room to look at it. It gives me a deep feeling of peace. Thanks Marla for doing what you do!

would you like to tango?

Mi Buenos Aires querido! cuando yo te vuelva a ver... no habra mas pena, ni olvido...

I had never painted the human figure, until this last weekend. One of my argentine friends (she is one of my best friends here) gave me a bunch of pictures with tango couples dancing. Most of them are already paintings, but there was one that was an actual photograph of the real stuff. That is what I picked.

"you paint from photos, not from paintings. A painting is that painter's interpretation of the picture, not yours!"



And so I did. The pictures take away most of the color transitions. They blend in the colors too much. What I like about this piece is that the further you go, the more "real" or "picture like" it looks like.

sky holes

I took a private lesson for the very first time in my life. Barbara guided me thru the process of choosing the right values, before and after the underpainting. We used some kind of turpenoid (the smell was quite intense we were getting all dizzy).
We spent more time talking about art than actually doing the stuff. So I left with this much done...

I spent the next day working on this. Note the detail of "sky holes" or breaking thru the red of the tree with a background color (either the sky blue or the mountain purple coming thru). This is an effect that I like a lot, noone ever thinks that one would first paint the tree to then add "sky" parts in between branches! but that's the only way to do it, or at least, the one that turns out more realistic.

trees in midday light

It was almost a year ago when I decided to start investing more time working with pastels.
And now is the time when I am getting some good results out of that investment. I love colors and I love drawing, so much that I usually paint at night, yes! with a big day light. Nights are quiet and it helps me relax. Get my brain filled with something other than work for a change.

I grabbed this photo from my cousin's album. A trip she did to the south of our beloved Argentina. The first attempt was colorful (nature is always hard, the picture is all green), but there was something fake about the trees. I could not figure out exactly what. I had the piece sitting on the easel for a loooong time until I realize it was the shape of the trees, yes! they looked like bushes and they needed to be more pointy.
First attempt:

So there! orange and blues to cut the green a bit. Lots of detail in this one. It's almost like a real picture.
After reshaping the trees, we have "On the way to Tronador" (Camino al Tronador). The picture was taken on the hike to the Tronador volcano in Argentina.

Dramatic skies

I am not quite sure how much an under paint gives me - this one was done with purple values and rubbing alcohol. The picture on the right has some blues and yellows layered on top of it.

So I am not convinced about the advantages of under painting and when or not to use it.... You sure use less pastel because you don't have to rub in so much chalk to cover all of the white spots in the sand paper.

The key to realistic clouds is to paint the sky into the cloud - negative painting. It gives the clouds their typical transparency and "cuttony" appearance.

I got some compliments on this one. It started as a study and it turned out to be very soothing to the eye. I love the fact that there are so many blue transitions. Now I am going to have to frame it!

Shadows

I finally pushed myself to join one of the local pastel workshops.
Barbara Van Dyke Shuman's monthly workshops are a treat. I got to know one of the most kind artists and teachers in the area. I also got to meet new people that share the passion for pastels as much as I do. By working in her studio surrounded by all her art work it was easier to engage and complete my work from start to finish.

This was a big step for me. With her guidance I painted a very realistic shadow/light contrast landscape using a reference photo. We started by doing a little sketch where we identified values, lightest light and darkest dark are so important! I realized how sketching makes finding the right values on your palette much easier.

 

 

I would have never picked purple and pink for the mountains. Barbara's suggestion was the critical touch that made the yellow in the field look even more luminous! Plus she let me use one of her best pastel sets :).

a landscape

I painted this back in May of this year. I had just gotten a new set of sennelier colors and I was super excited to try them out. My main interest here was to make the water fairly real in the front part of the painting. The paper was not the best choice. But I am pretty happy with this.