“Reflections of His Glory” – 12″ x 16″ on Canson Mi-Tientes

“Reflections of His Glory” – 12″ x 16″ on cream colored Mi-Teintes
“Tell of His glory among the nations, His wonderful deeds among all the peoples. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised…” – Psalm 96:3-4

*from a copyright free for commercial use photo reference
This is the second piece I completed with soft pastel. I absolutely loved working on this piece. I only had my original set of Sennelier half sticks at the time, plus a few pastel pencils. I started by laying in the clouds using the cream colored background as a base, I laid in the blues first and then scumbled in the wisps of white and yellows for highlights and purples as shadow. The sky came together pretty quickly, and then I worked back to front/top to bottom. One challenge was that I kept having to lay the shadows of the marsh darker and darker, along with the shadows of the boats. The biggest challenge was getting the water to have depth with the reflections “floating” on top. But it is great that pastel works really well from dark to light without getting muddy. I loved the process of doing this one, as I learned so much about how to blend and use the texture of the paper for effects and how much pastel the paper could take as I layered.I was very happy with the result.