Portage Island Cliff 6×6 Series No. 3 – Soft pastel painting by Nancy Ging – Copyright 2016

Today I finished the third piece in the 6×6 series I’m doing of the south end of Portage Island. If you recall, I’m working on 36 different versions of the same scene. The landscape shows a clearing with a lone birch tree and a beautifully curved spruce tree above a steep cliff. All paintings will be 6 inches square.

The photo above shows the third piece in the series. This time I aimed for a monochrome painting with some color added at the center of interest: the birch tree. I also added just a few touches of color to the foreground to add some depth to the painting.

It’s interesting to do monochrome paintings sometimes to study the values in the composition. Values are the darkness or lightness of any color. Values are more obvious in black and white photos or monochrome paintings. Many artists, including me, like to simplify a scene by using a limited number of values. I usually use four values of the same color. In this painting I used nearly black, nearly white, and dark gray and light gray pastel sticks, and then added about half a dozen other colors.

On to painting number 4!

Click here to see all pastel paintings in the Portage Island Cliff 6×6 Series.