DJ Geribo

I love trying new art materials. Sometimes I will have them for awhile before I actually try them out for the first time. And that is the case with the new suede paper I bought for pastels. Although I did buy it at Christmas, which wasn't that long ago, still it has been sitting in my drawer and today I finally decided to cut a piece up into a few smaller pieces so that I could try it out.

I have a solo show coming up in July so I've been working on my inventory for that, painting a variety of different sized paintings for the show since I'm not sure how many I will be able to hang in the show yet. Since it is a small piece, I thought I should use the pastel pencils for the details.

I started drawing the moose on the surface and instead of drawing in with a graphite pencil, I used my pastel pencils. I got a new kneaded eraser and was thrilled when the places I needed to erase came right off, without any effort. Now, I love doing animal portraits on velour paper, and they look fabulous on this paper, but you really cannot make corrections on velour. I've had to start from scratch when I've made mistakes on a commissioned piece. I don't yet have a feel for how much pastel the paper will hold, but I think I can probably rub the color into the paper and it will hold onto it. I also need to do some research on the paper and find out whether or not it needs to have fixative (or if it can even tolerate fixative).

This is what I have so far....long way to go!