About This Work

Color Addition This pastel drawing ‘Free Floating Blue Wave Nude – 10-02-21’ is based on a previous graphite pencil drawing ‘Roundism – 19-07-16’. In my art statement to that drawing I already explained my motives to render the floating female figure in my roundism style. Lately I am converting some of my previous works in pastel. The question I put myself is if I have to change the composition and the tonality. Surely color comes into play but that does not mean I should let the composition undisturbed. I make mistakes all the time and by some drawings in the past I am deeply embarrassed in retrospective. However, that does not apply to this drawing. It needed only the invention of a color scheme that would match an enchanting depiction. Color Variety Since converting a motif to a larger scale was easy I had plenty of time to experiment with colors. For some reason I felt I had to lay low on the color variety. My last pastel drawing already shows a color palet stretched to the max. Obviously a submerged object looses its color quickly, only to be girdled by blue and green water hues. Therefor I decided to use only a narrow color bandwidth: half a color wheel to be precise. Limitation always is master’s token. Different Kinds of Blue In order to enhance vibrancy I placed different kinds of blue next to eachother. Greenish blue touches such as phtalo blue green are placed next to reddish blue like ultramarine. I call this the complementary contrast within one main color. On the other hand true complementary color contrasts are visible in the green and pink / purple hues of the female form. These are not as dominant as the quantity of blue hues though. The reason is that both colors lack a strong chroma due to the light tonal planes they are at. In addition they are less in quantity throughout the whole pastel. Pastel drawing on Clairfontaine Pastel Mat paper (69.4 x 49.8 x 0.1 cm) Artist: Corné Akkers