Tuesday's painting...

... Painting for today, a sunset in pastels.

A different paper used today.

I have a sketchbook of different coloured Ingres paper. It is mostly the darker papers. This shade of brown paper is called sable I think. And J used to use this colour a lot in his pastel paintings. He bought Ingres mounting board to do his pastels on. I probably have some in the garage, when he bought stuff, I went and bought the same (or he bought some for me), but stored it for my old age when I would be unable to go to the shops...well, we have Armageddon Apocalypse now, so that's the same thing.

There is probably enough paint (as long as they don't dry out, but the watercolours are always usable even if they dry out) and paper and canvas supplies in the garage to keep me going until I am a hundred...

Anyway, I am much happier with this pastel than I was with the one yesterday. I think I like the Ingres paper much more than the Mi-teintes Canson paper. It was more satisfying to do the pastels on.

This is only small, about 8" x 5" (inches). I have never been able to visually see in cm, I can gauge by guesswork in inches. It took me nearly an hour and a half. By the way J would do a sunset in a fraction of the time, and he utilised so much more of the natural sable brown of the paper as part of the sunset. So he used very little pastel.

Oh, and that green at the bottom, it's not black, it is a green soft pastel that verges on black. I love it, but I have almost none left now. J and I used to often find artists paint and materials in charity shops, and this set of pastels was one of my finds in Oxfam. A very very old wooden box of soft pastels. It was an antique really. But I took the pastels out, used the compartmentalised wooden box for something else. The soft pastels were very fragile, crumbled easily, so I put them in dry rice which I hoped would stop them cross contaminating the other colours, but ended up just putting kitchen paper in my plastic boxes of different coloured pastels so I could still use the dust that crumbled off them.

Any way, this dark green at the bottom of this pastel above is nearly gone now. Just a few scraps remain.

I did find the same brand online. It was still going, so ordered a set, but that dark green doesn't have the same pigment intensity any more. I did check why, and it seems that they were not made in the same place anymore, and had been sourced out to China, and so the original pigment had changed. I think this has happened with other painting materials.

Just because things as paints are now made in China doesn't necessarily mean poor quality, I am not saying that. I have some very intense paints and pigments too from China (it is almost impossible to wash some out of your hands, they last for days!).