In the spirit of keeping things simple (and vaguely inspired by the westward drive home from the city to the mountains this afternoon), I decided to try a couple of quick, colourful pieces that started with a red horizon line. (Medium: Water-soluble Oil Pastels - using a box of them found in Dad’s studio).
Wendy Mac’s wonderful artsy community is full of terrific prompts, ideas, and, best of all, like-minded people who are exploring art-making. Check it out here:
In a newsletter about perspective, for example, she demonstrates what happens when you move your horizon line (the red line in my examples) up and down on the page and the vanishing point (right at the end of the road) to the left or right.
I tried to keep the colour palette similar in both of these and didn’t worry too much about doing anything more than using quick, bold swaths of colour to fill in the idea of mountains, foreground, sky. After smearing some of the oil pastels down on the page I used a water pen to smoodge everything around a bit with a bit of crude blending.
Today was a long day, disrupted by coming and going to the big city, cramming in errands and rushing back for a meeting, then dinner… you know, life. Doing these was a fun way to think about perspective and the short time available to work meant there wasn’t much opportunity for overthinking.
And that, as they say, is all she wrote…