Pastel experiment

Dear Nikki/Dear Sarah--Day 502 of our daily art dalliances

Dear Nikki,

Busy day today—out for breakfast, then spent far too much time in a mall, switching mobile phone providers. I won’t go into detail about the frustrations involved, but suffice it to say I came away from the experience with a massive headache. Picked up some old pavers and boards from a friend (I need to raise some of the pots on my deck) and lugged them into my apartment, at which point I made a smoothie and lay on my couch for a while.

My contribution today is an experiment I did with some oil pastels—I’ve been reading a lot about Caran D’Arche Neocolor II water-soluble oil pastels, and they sound marvelous. However, I already have two small sets of pastels which I don’t use very often. So before purchasing a set of Neocolor II (quite pricey, but 20% off at Opus), I thought I should do some swatching with what I have. Turns our one set is not water-soluble at all (but quite lovely) and the other set is water-soluble but very waxy—more like a crayon in not very subtle colours. Instead of doing boring swatches, I re-interpreted the birthday flower painting from yesterday. Non-water soluble on the left and water soluble on the right. I don’t much like the waxy, water soluble ones—they don’t blend well—so I think I’ll buy three single Neocolor II’s and experiment with those.

Hope the rest of your weekend was inspiring and fun.

XO S

Hello!

Well, that was a blissful weekend, but now fully back into the chaos of trying to get reorganized for a very long drive starting crack of dawn tomorrow.

I was only able to shred some paper and create something that will someday be some kind of background.

Back to packing.

(and, commiserating - my LEAST favourite thing to do on the planet is dealing with new phones…)

Nikki