LET IT SNOW! LET IT SNOW! LET IT SNOW!

                                                    Let It Snow!      Pastel | 9x12

Our Northern California Motto, right now, is LET IT SNOW!   The airwaves were loaded today with scenes of friends skiing in Northern Cal and Nevada.  I am so enamored of snow scenes as I paintd my 3rd in 3 days of snow scenes! Just as a recent trip through the Cascades quenched my drought- weary thirst, so now do snow scenes make me feel like finally we get to experience water in all its weather forms.

Painting notes: I'm going to label this a 'break-thru' painting as I used so many techniques on it- some old but many new. OLD: used my handy-dandy Rubber Finger Tip (turned inside out) to push the pastel into the sky and parts of the river - unlike one's finger, nothing equals a finger tip ('dollar-bill' counter) for a velvet finish! NEWER: Using the edge of square pastels to make vertical lines depicting branches. AND this marvelous substrate, Art Spectrum Aubergine, let's you use and abuse it in so many luscious ways!  I started with an underpainting of all areas, spritzed it with ISO 90, then applied my marks. And that's the best part - it is truly a painting that is all about the Mark Making- as Kim Lordier and others call it. Judiciously, lightly applied strokes that barely touch the substrate. NEWEST: again Sennlier Iridescent White rolled onto the foreground branches, then pushed into the board by covering it with a piece of the waxy side of the self-adhesive foam board covering. Karen Margulis recently posted paintings in which she razor-scraped white shavings, then adhered them to the surface by covering them and pressing them into the board.