Experimenting

Now that the studio tour is over it's back to work. I have been working on several pastels lately, trying new things some are working & some? well we will see. The first one is a view of the bottom of a river that my husband & I love to kayak on. The river is shallow, with trees on both sides & the sun often shinning onto the golden sands. I was having problems with the image, then after watching the movie Gerhart Richter Painting (great movie by the way, worth watching) & seeing him use his sqeegee I thought why not on my pastels? I have used one before for acrylic but never pastel. So I did it

It didn't quite do what I wanted but the result was still pretty good. I think I had to much pastel on the board. I'll definately try this again.
The next one I tried was a pastel that I had painted on Pastelboard. I had never used pastelboard before, it is a hard surface, like clayboard. I didn't like it. It doesn't have that same soft, velvety feeling of my usual sueded mat board. Because I didn't like what I had painted I was going to wash it off then thought maybe just wetting it I could get it to drip, it could be very interesting. So I sprayed it with water, a lot of water. This is what happened.

This is still wet but I think I really like this, can't wait to see it when it dries. I may actually buy more of this board just to do this if it stays like this.