Back in September, the koi were everywhere.
The one on the easel has been pulled from storage and will make the trip to the framer soon. Hopefully soon. It needs an application of fixative for which I need to be able to go outdoors, and anyone in the Washington DC area can tell you that we’ve had an unprecedented season of rain. I have contemplated building an ark.
Last fall I made a lot of koi drawings in pastel. Other drawings are visible around the sides of the easel. I loved that long session of painting with pastel and am eager to resume using the medium again. Even though many of my life class drawings were made with pastel, I don’t think of those as being the same as these koi drawings since the kois were made on sanded paper. The sanded surface allows for options that the plain paper doesn’t. They are both wonderful, though — now I’m feeling guilty. All art supplies are wonderful, each in their own ways. But maybe it’s also the control I can exert while working in my own studio that isn’t possible in a life class. Most of my pastel palette had to stay home when I did the life class drawings.
Plus I like working large. In my studio I was working about as large as is practicable (unless I get a bigger studio). The largest work (seen behind the easel on its side above, and on the easel in the photo below) was made by taping together two large sheets of sanded paper. When the paper is large, the fish seem more real. They begin to approach life size. Kois can get big!
The board that the paper is attached to is 40 x 6o inches. But the biggest of the fishes (excluding the ones that got away) are on individual sheets of the large sanded paper. I put two sheets on a board and would cover up the one on the bottom whenever I worked on the top one to prevent pastel dust from falling upon it. They stay on these boards in storage until they’re ready to be framed.
During winter with the space being so close I have avoided the big pastel binge, but with the weather improving I long to return to pastel again in a big way. Need to find these guys a home, and then probably the next up will be flowers.
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