little pictures of the hillside; little pictures all the same...

the title of this blog makes no sense unless you perhaps watched the first couple of seasons of Weeds on Showtime. The goofy, off-key song was about little houses in suburbia, CA, all the same only different colors...so go figure...my Series of 100...little pictures, all the same except in color. :-/

I worked these images with a new pastel brand...Richeson pastels. They offered a nice set of landscape pastels through Dakota Art Pastels (my favorite pastel store in the world), so decided to try them. The set is a quite pastelish set...what I would call "pretty" colors in a lot of pastel shades...pinks and blues, blue greens, warm browns, yellows and brilliant greens and lavenders. So I did one in really just blue, cream and pink. My least favorite. I do like however, how the pastel works on the Wallis paper. The colors are rich and I only wished for some killer blues like 463- Sennelier - so dark it is almost black. This little study is my least favorite as I was scanning the series so far. I might go back, add some workable fix to the blue trees and make it frosty. the next one that I did #31 was a study with a mix of different pastel brands and using the favorite 463 blue for the distant hills and background for brush and trees. I can't get past it's richness and how it causes the image to "pop". I will use the Richeson pastels, however along with the others that are favorites. I hope to get to some place that has open stock of these pastels, because I am certain that there is darker darks etc to be had!

So as the fog settles in today; I ignored it painting. Was not even a bother. I was however, thinking of the beautiful day we had yesterday with the sun bright in the sky; the mountains dark and the sky a wonderful blue!

We are off to the Hospice Annual Event to raise money for this organization. Looking forward to visiting with friends and sitting through the live auction. "Cottonwoods" was my donation to the event and hopefully it will garner a nice sum of money for this worthy cause!

happy painting...