Daily Pastel Paintings

Pastel Painting: Yellow Flower Field

Don't throw away old paintings!

"Yellow Flower Field" 17 x 17 cm Original Pastel Painting.

Available on Etsy

Are you throwing away your old paintings? Well I don't. They are a reminder of how well I am progressing in my art journey. I take out my old unsuccessful paintings from time to time and compare them to my newer paintings. I try to see the mistakes I made. I try to imagine how it would have been better. I try to see my mark making. This is a great opportunity to criticise yourself!

I also use expensive sand paper. I don't want to waste it by throwing away every bad painting. I have used Uart and Fisher sand papers so far. They both can be washed. Yes I am actually talking about taking the painting to the sink and literally washing it with running water. This is what I did to the below painting. You can even scrub it with a bristle brush to recover the paper completely. But I didn't do that with this particular one. Because I like this composition and I intend to do something very similar. So I washed it gently. When its dried, my underpainting is ready!

An old unsuccessful painting washed with water.

I knew what to do for the sky, for the distant tree line and the big trees on the right. I painted this composition before so I didn't use any reference photo for that section. For the foreground, I used this reference photo from *Pmp-art.com. (I cannot include the photo itself because of the copyright issues. You can join the site to see the photo and use their other reference photos as well.)

Reference photo has a colorful tulips field. I decided that this many colors will complicate the painting and I painted them only in yellow. I also defined the pathway a little more.

*Pmp-art.com is a great source of reference photos for artists. I try and use my own reference photos whenever I can but the landscape I am in is very limited. So I use this site for more inspiration from all over the world.

So below is the final painting.