Finishing touches are the strokes, or more often, the selective lack of strokes that make a painting sing.
 
I paint on location as well as in my studio. It seems easier to finish out a painting in the studio.  There, I'm unhurried by changing weather, transportation, wandering art critics. Inside the studio lives continuity.
 
A studio painter can walk away from her easel. The next day, and the next, and so on— long as necessary—a studio artist steps back up to that easel and finds it in the very same spot it stood in during the previous painting session.  (Or else, someone in the family is in big trouble!) The studio artist finds her paints still arranged in whatever orderly or chaotic system she finds useful. The light is the same, or else the artist flips a switch and makes it so. There's a rhythm to painting in a studio, a pattern. Pattern makes it easier to know what next.

  unfinished 9' x 12" pastel
 Day One on location

                     Day 2
               
                      "STORM COMING AND LAUNDRY ON THE LINE" 
                     9" x 12" pastel on archival Wallis copyright Lindy C Severns 2009  
                    $550 (unframed)   shop.oldspanishtrailstudio.com

Plein air painting, otherwise known as "enduring the elements while attempting to produce a work of art" is fun. At leastit can be fun, for those of us who enjoy nature. But there are huge differences in studio painting and painting en plein air. Finishing, for me, anyway, is a giant difference. Study these two stages of the painting above. (I blogged about working on it in my last entry, "Blinded By Green". )

So, why is the top painting unfinished? (Ignore the fact that raindrops falling on my head made me call it a day.)

1. When I hurriedly packed up my Soltek easel and sealed my pastel in its foamcore carrying case for protection, I considered the sky finished.
2. The tree line in the middle ground was very green, with little variety in mass, color or value.
3. The foreground trees didn't stand out against the middle ground. The middle third of my painting seemed overworked. Boring. (Green.)
4. The foreground grass was still sketchy. (I basically work from top to bottom, and I hadn't gotten far on the bottom before rain made me stop.) I liked the broken color I'd swatched into it, altho the blue green resembled water.
5. The colors were vibrant, but they didn't flow together. The painting was TOO TOO much.
6. The killer: When I studied my painting, I wondered what I'd originally intended to say. (Had I intended to say anything, or had I just started painting?) Working on location, this lack of focus can prove fatal for a painting, but I like to think I can recussitate most anything.

Of course, with thunder and lightning overhead, I didn't have time to make any of these corrections, even if I'd recognized them after several hours of painting.

Next day, I broke out the ol' easel again. Set up my limited plein air pastel palette. Took the painting from its case. Looked at the new day's threatening sky. Realized a motorhome had parked between my locale and the cabin and clothesline in the painting's corner. Said a bad word about that. A quarter of my view was gone.

At that, I found my focus: The painting was ABOUT the inevitable afternoon shower and those bright clothes hanging on the line, now invisible to me. I didn't have to see them, though. (Surely the lady of the house had taken them off the line by then.) It was their color I needed!

The clothes had created tiny breaks in large masses of green, and that's what I needed to play on. (In these photos, you can barely make out that there's a cabin and a clothesline, but you can see the bits of color.) FOR A ZOOMED VIEW OF THE FINISHED PASTEL, GO TO THE PASTEL PORTFOLIO PAGE ON MY WEBSITE

I didn't need all those boring, defined trees in the mid-ground now. I took a stiff dry paintbrush (the kind that come in a child's watercolor tin works great on a small canvas) and vigorously brushed as much pigment off the green middleground as I could. Pastel doesn't brush off Wallis paper easily, so I knew some would remain as underpainting. Lightly, I brush-blended the grassy foreground. That killed those blue notes bothering me.

This left the sky and the small triangle of cabin and clothesline untouched. Untouched, both stood out. I reminded myself not to lose that triangle. 

Although happy with the first day's sky, it needed adjusting to relate to my new focal triangle of cabin and clothesline. I introduced an apricot/gold chalk (in my plein air set up, I use tidbits of pastel sticks and have no idea what color brand or number they are. In the studio, I can tell you exactly what color I'm using and who makes it.) I accented a Z-shaped line of existing white highlights with this warm sunny color so it pointed at the focal triangle. I blended this into the white highlights, using my fingertip. That small change put the remaining clouds into too much contrast, so I floated pure white over the darker clouds and cerulean sky. More subtle.

Using purples, caput mortuum (love that color) and small switches of my darkest green, I next redefined the mass of trees in the middle ground. Light strokes, and not many of them were required. The brushed green underpainting was already there. Also, I now knew the painting wasn't about those trees!

Using very sharp pastel pencils, I redefined the laundry, giving the line more of a drooping curve as well. I used my darkest green soft pastel around the cabin to give it definition, my darkest mauve behind the clothes. (By using two darks of the same value but different color, the shadow mass behind my focal point holds interest.)

All that remained was to choose a light-valued green to re-emphasize the light that already ran behind the tree line and beneath the clothes. I used this lightest value sparsely, then stepped down to darker greens for all the other highlights in the trees and grass. A few lines of branches with ochre and rust pastel pencils, then a few highlights of greens gave life to the foremost trees, which now stood out— mainly, because the trees in the background didn't. But even these fleshed-out trees no longer competed with the clothesline and cabin area.
 
I rolled a mid-value green pastel over the foreground, the direction my hand traveled following the rolling contours of the gopher-infested meadow I painted. This, I glazed with a raw sienna colored NuPastel stick. (Pastel glazing uses strokes so light, they are almost non-existant over what's already there. This subtly blends color without muddying it, and can give a lusciously rich transparency to a pastel painting.) I used the NuPastel glaze to further define the contours by stroking in the directions I imagined water would run, if poured on my subject landscape.

And then, I signed the thing. A new storm was billowing. And too, I'd run out of things I wanted to say.

TEN QUICK TIPS TO PLEIN AIR PASTEL PAINTING AND/OR LIFE AS A PASTELIST:

1. Don't quit on a painting (or a person) too soon.
2. Know what you want to say. Then find the quickest, most direct way to say it. (Not like my rambling blogs...)
3. Beware boring green masses that try, like creatures from a B-grade horror movie, to smother your vulnerable focal point.
4. There is no such thing as one little change that doesn't affect anything else. (If a butterfly flaps its wings in China and all that.)
5. Use any tool you need to get the effect you desire. Knocking pigment off your paper is a real de-stressor.
6. Purple and green are BFF's. Use them together so neither gets bored and listess.
7. Professional artists don't always know what color they're using, either.
8. You don't have to tell everything you know. And you certainly don't need to know every tree to paint a forest.
9. Make the stick of pastel you hold follow the contours of the land like you're Tiger Woods on the 18th green at the Masters. Learn to putt, if necessary. That tip about imagining which way water poured over the ground would flow came from a golf pro who must be so glad I pursued art and not golf...
10. Pastels are female pigments. Pastels never promise to be cheap, simple, or forgiving. Just when you think you have them figured out, a new layer of complexity makes you question whether blue and yellow make green or some mysterious new color like chartreuse. (If you can't handle this, choose oils. They are sooo solid and predicable, they must surely be male.)