Pastel Art - The Old Barn

I've been so carried away with pastel pencil art that I've done no cards for weeks but I have managed to finish a quilt top.... but of course now the weather has become too hot to quilt it!

So this is what I've been up to. It's another of Colin Bradley's lessons - The Old Barn. I've changed it a bit by removing the bath tub, mainly because I'd stuffed up the pallet and tyres on the right and didn't want to ruin the picture further. I also didn't do a very good job on the barrel.

I've nearly finished a snow scene and will post that next week. I'm becoming more confident now which is partly what led to the stuff ups on this because I've been anticipating his next move and not actually following his instructions closely enough. But I'm taking that as a good sign, because in the main, I'm doing pretty much what he is doing, one step ahead of him. With each picture though, I'm learning something new, so the plan is to keep going until I run out of Colin's landscapes and then embark on some of my own.

Old Man

I seem to have a run of cards to make for men lately. This one is for a birthday. It has to be posted so I've kept it to a standard size. I haven't distressed the edges of the image layer - just badly inked it but i rather like the jagged effect. Sometimes mistakes work in my favour!

The image has been coloured with copic markers. I don't have many skin tones so that was done with Prismacolor pencils and zest it blender. Despite all the warnings about the paper needing tooth for pencils, it was fine done on smooth blend it card. In real life the skin colour is not quite as dark as it looks here in thee photo.

Pastel art swans

Another of Colin Bradley's lessons - Swans and Cygnets

This one was a lot harder - trying to make an all white swan look all white but fluffy at the same time. Not a good job on my part.

Venetian Acccents

This card was made using the venetian accents  die from Spellbinders. It is layered and the cut out in the centre is layered down, but it needs more depth. I have been trying to figure out how to do that. I have some theories - I just have to put them into practice and hope it works. My problem is accuracy and how to manage that without wasting too much card.

The centre flower is a pressed bronze metal piece with a half pearl glued in the middle. On something simple like this, it looks quite effective. Not to feminine so it could conceivably be used for a card for a man.

Waterfall Pastel Art

This time another landscape exercise from Colin Bradley's lessons.

This one was very hard. The bushes in the background are a challenge at any time. then there were the rocks. I couldn't seem to follow what Colin was doing and mine was very different to his in the end. What he started out with and which I did, was patches of pale colour which were then blended into the paper with a colour shaper - all looking very vague and a bit of a mess. then he started shaping the rocks and that's where I got lost. What I ended up doing was rounding off my rocks that looked all angular and darkening the areas between them. I was just about to rip it up in frustration when the phone rang. When I got up and  looked back on it from a distance it looked like real rocks! It was all done by sheer accident - me just messing around with the shapes because I didn't like the angular look of what I had drawn originally. So I started scribbling with a variety of colours, darkening the shadows between the rocks, rounding the rocks off and adding some highlights just below the darkest parts and miraculously it looked a bit more real.

Then of course I messed it up again with the waterfalls.....