Today's Daily painting is a pastel done on Colorfix paper.
More on pastel surfaces.

This Daily painting is a pastel titled Zion Field View

I do like working on Colorfix paper. But I still can't build up the layers as much as I would like. The paper comes in a great assortment of colors and also in white, so that you can tone your paper or do an underpainting. For this painting I used a cream paper because it was what I had, but I wanted to create more drama, so I put on some nupastel in a very dark blue. Then washed it down with alcohol, which made the pastel even darker and richer. This gave me the a good starting point for this painting. 

More about how important your pastel painting surface is!

Pennsylvania Farm Field

Pastel on Arches Watercolor paper

Today's Daily painting was done on 300 lb. arches watercolor paper. This is a surface that I have used a lot for Pastels and one I have always liked very much. The only problem with it, is that it needs to be mounted on gator board before you can paint on it.

Sometimes I have no free gator board in the studio, which is a good thing because it means I've been working a lot. But when you are excited about an idea for a painting and you have no paper mounted, it can be a problem.

 So I am exploring other surfaces to do my daily paintings on. I am getting used to the 400 UART paper, and will blog more about that in future blogs.

"Why what you paint on is as important as what you paint"

For today's daily painting I used a new product called "Multimedia Artboard"
The benefits are it doesn't warp and will accept layers of pastel.
It is white so it's good for an under painting because it accepts water, mineral spirits, and turpentine applications. Best of all it is lightweight, and very thin. Which makes it great for travel, also plain air!
It can also be used for oil. It's acid free with a neutral ph.

However, I was not really happy with how it accepted the pastel. I tried it with some nupastel and an assortment of soft pastels. It is not totally level, from the manufacturing process. So when you apply the pastel on it's side there are little round areas that are deeper that the pastel misses. If you apply the pastel harder to fill in those spots it fills the tooth leaving you with no more layers. This I found to be problematic. So, I might save this board for oils only. Or try using it to create my own surface for pastels.

Has anyone else tried this product? Would like to here your comments on how you liked this product!