Lindy Whitton Studio

Life by the River

Pathways are a drawcard to me. I love to imagine whats around the corner, to catch just a glimpse of the beyond and then maybe follow the path and see where it actually leads.

I often include them in paintings for the same reason . It allows the viewer to let their imagination take them along the path beyond my interpretation of the scene, adding their own experiences to the painting’s story.

Here’s a little pathway down Dover way as the Huon River empties into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

It’s a mini pastel done on Colourfix paper with mostly very soft Terry Ludwig pastels. When the paintings are so small I tend to give the harder pastels a miss and use the soft pastels to lay down quick, thick marks to represent the scene.

I’m not trying to build up layers. I simply want to capture the mood in a very shorthand way.

Compositionally this leaves a lot to be desired! That path is sloping quite dramatically and I should have paid attention to that using directional marks to make it a little flatter.

I don’t like how the large tree is cropped in a way that leans out of the picture although the curved branch helps to balance that out a bit.

I also feel I’ve split the whole scene into thirds…sky, water, land…and I could have made one more of a focus than the others.

The trees do connect all three sections so that’s a plus.

Full disclosure, I didn’t do a thumbnail before this one and it shows. Thumbnails are where I work out quickly what’s working compositionally and what’s not. If I’m going ahead with a larger painting then a mini version like this can really help me see if my ideas translate to the paper but how much quicker if I’d done that thumbnail first!

A thumbnail is a path I can follow to get to my compositional destination with less effort and time. A few minutes at the beginning and I can save myself a lot of wrong turns and frustrations.