Snow !

Inspired by Bill, I recently started to pick up pastel, trying to learn the nature of the medium. I'm using what i had in hand, some left over hard pastel, and some 'sticky' pastel, and some new soft pastel Bill introduced me to.
I found all different pastels can serve different functions. Like, soft pastel is easier to mix colors and blend, and sticky ones are good for strong high light or texture surfaces, then, the hard pastels can do good sharp edges and accents of shadows... It's kinda fun to experiment with different pastels, like having a set of different sized and hairs of brushes...
Here are a few sketches I've made during a short weekend trip to Tahoe, I wanted to try out painting snow!
which is a subject that I'm not so familiar with and didn't grew up with. the whole time I was so fascinated with the bright, high key colors of snow,
and some odd funny sceneries, like cars buried in deep snow, or grand scale of ski runs on the hills...

Tilden Grizzly Hill

yes, it was Very Very cold...
though the view of the bay was incredible !
I could even see the ocean beyond S.F. !

Road side, in the morning.

Another contribution from the other side of factory fence.
There is a constant battle in my mind -
"ah ... this place is so cool! I'm gonna draw down everything!!" vs. " simplify simplify... simplify..."
I'd like to give another try of this set again, a good challenge to simplify complicated scene..^_^

2nd \(^_^)/

This is from the first morning, we went out to the ferry port area in Alameda to paint the giant East bay cranes.
Being closer to the port work site, the scales of the cargo boats and cranes were surely amazing.
Watching the waiting line to the early ferry began to grow, cranes slowly started to move, and ships cruised by..
it all seemed to come alive with the sunrise! and painting this early sure was a great warm up for the day! *_*
and yes! Thanks to Mike setting up the blog !