Orange and Blue

I wanted to try the PanPastels out so I figured I'd try painting one of the other sky scenes to go along with the black and white one. Still haven't done much full-color painting of any kind, so this gave me a good chance to try that out as well.

I started on a white sheet of Pastelmat (which was intimidating, since I'm used to working on colored paper) and used the landscape set to rough in the background areas... pretty much everything got either a blue or magenta underpainting. Afterwards, I started working with both the landscape and dark shades set and adding in the shadows behind the clouds using the dark colors, then I roughed in the clouds with a couple shades of yellow pans. When I was satisfied with their overall shape, I switched over to the rest of my soft pastels and started adding in the upper layers: I was really glad to have the big 80-set of Senneliers here, since they provided most of the colors for the clouds. I used a Great American blue (called Neptune, love the color names for them) to add in the really intense blue color to the large areas of the sky... it almost exactly matched the actual color of the sky that day.

9x12" on Pastelmat.

Darkness and Light

I love this time of year. The weather's been cold but not freezing and there's a certain way the light falls when the sun comes out that results in some fantastic sky patterns. I've never really done any landscapes, much less skyscapes, so I figured I'd go all in and try something dramatic.

This is a view of the sky from my house when it was this brilliant orange and purple color last week.
Totally freehanded this one, no tools/measurements or anything... I don't know how well I could do that for a portrait but it was no problem with scenery.

The foreground scenery was drawn with a soft charcoal stick and the sky was done with a black PanPastel and one of those round sponges as well as the flat, rectangular sponge. I really like PanPastels so far.

9x12" on Strathmore 500 charcoal paper. I'm not sure whether to call this one a drawing or painting.