The chalk pastels class instructor handed out some laminated pictures of a painting of four pieces of fruit. She asked us to loosely sketch the fruit with our charcoal sticks, then she demonstrated how to apply chalk pastels to the paper.
I smeared my work right off the bat. I'd get one part looking halfway decent and then ruin it while working on something else. The edges of things kept disappearing. It wasn't looking to good for chalks being a medium that appealed to me. Right there in class, I abandoned the fruit and just started playing, filling the page with color. I accidentally created a beach behind the fruit. I smeared that away and made cresting wave in front of the fruit. With a little work, the wave could become bunched-up fabric. I tried to turn a green apple and a peach into a green apple and a plum, and the two objects almost became an avocado.
I left the class thinking, Well, that was fun, but . . . I dunno . . . .
A couple of hours after I got home, I tried another picture. The subject was an old mill that I photographed on some camping trip to Missouri. I can't quite make out some of the details in front of the building. It looks like there might be two ramps with rails, and more rails around a walkway leading down to the water. I'll never be able to do the railings in chalk without creating a muddy mess. I had a pretty nice tree working until I tried to fill in behind it. It just went from bad to worse. There's so much chalk on the upper right-hand side that the paper won't hold another morsel. I tried to rub some off, but I think it only smeared it deeper into the paper. I backed away from it.
However, I think it still has potential - maybe it's not totally ruined yet. I'm going to take it to class next week to see if the instructor can show me some tricks to redeem it.
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