Back to the street scene in Lucca, Italy, addressed in a recent blog post.
The subject at hand is how to paint a brick wall in pastel. Here's a quick lesson.
The goal is not to draw individual bricks. At most, a few specific bricks delineated among the mass of bricks will suffice.
First, we want to lay down the mortar color, the stuff that holds the bricks in place. In the example below, the "glue" is a grayish-white hue. I applied the mortar lightly on the surface of the building.
My deep red Unison pastel does the brick-laying work. I also chose a variety of lighter value red/purples as well as red orange. My thumb nail retains remnants of another work-in-progress painting.
I use pastel pencils to help with some of the finer details that I want to convey (not too many of such details, of course)!
Below is the update. More to come!
As I mentioned earlier about architecture, lines are important. A little bit of refining with a ruler's edge will finish up the windows and the edge of the wall. The juxtapositioned complementary colors of red and green introduce a bit of spice to the scene.
I've been adding paintings for sale at my Etsy store as well as Daily Paintworks, where you can find bargains at auction. Click here for purchase information.