Perspectives: Charleston Charm

Here’s bringing you another piece of art by yours truly. But first, a minor confession. Lacking the proper motivation and time to devote to it (to say nothing of aptitude), my artistic output has taken a real nosedive of late. I’ve produced nothing in months aside from what I’m about to share here, and this I’ve been sitting on since last November, which I started on the heels of a trip to the place of inspiration, an October (birthday) jaunt to Charleston, South Carolina.

While all of Charleston is an architectural treat, I remember being quite enamored with this particular quiet spot in the French Quarter. I could loiter all day on crepe myrtle-lined cobblestone streets alongside these crumbly masonry walls in soft pastels. It is this muted, understated beauty that I tried to translate into my rendering, beginning with the pencil sketch, which is a simple, flat elevation with minimal architectural embellishments. More than any other piece I’ve done to date, I felt comfortable to keep the sketch fairly simple and let the detail come later through the build up of paint.

You can see here my first attempt using painter’s tape to add a thick border around the perimeter of the painting to make it look a bit more polished (more on that later). Another first with this project was working in two mediums – watercolor and soft pastel. While I know even less about pastels than watercolor and have virtually no idea what I’m doing, I love the medium and have been wanting to try my hand at it for some time. Below is the finished watercolor prior to the addition of the pastels, which still reads pretty flat despite the addition of details and layered color.

And here is the final final piece. Using the pastels, I attempted to create more dimension and contrast by adding light and dark areas as well as a few pops of more vivid color. The pastels are nice because you can use white and other light colors to draw highlights and details directly on top of the paint. Likewise, a dark-colored pastel can be wielded to create shadows, defined lines, and other details, but these can easily be laid down too dark if you’re a bit heavy-handed and are difficult to soften and blend.

As you can see in this image, in attempting to remove the tape, a layer of the underlying paper and even a bit of the paint came off with it. Upon a careful reading into the matter, I’m still not sure if it was the type of tape that I used, my removal technique, the fact that I left it on too long, or some combination therein that resulted in this unfortunate state. But perhaps the rough border adds a complimentary textural element to the painting, a slight nod to the patinaed stone? Or more likely it’s just the mark of an amateur. But I do like the look of the white border, so I suppose I will need to continue experimenting with various kinds of tape and techniques on future projects. More practice with understanding how to use the soft pastels, on their own and in conjunction with watercolors, is also in order. But the first trick to master – finding that elusive time and motivation…