Playing in the Pastel Dust

I actually did a no-pressure painting for fun and practice.  Well more practice than fun.  Right?  On the Southwest Forum on wetcanvas.com we have a monthly challenge to paint from photos provided by one of the artists.  October Monthly Challenge - Fall http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1361881 was put up by Jenna and we have not participated like we should.  I decided to do a very quick pastel, sort of like a sketch from one of the photos she supplied.  My sketch doesn't do justice to the photo.

Photo by Nicola Boerer on wet Canvas....

Pastel sketch on Canson Mi Teintes paper, gray.  It is about 17 x 12 inches.  I only spent about an hour on this so now I can critique what I did.  If I was going to make a finished painting, I would dedicate more time to the darks and background painting.  This would make the colors show up without being so glaring.  I would use a bit of a bluer sky and have some blues (the complement to orange) in the shadows.  The blue would gray the orange and soften the effect.  I also would like it better if I moved the big tree on the right farther to the right for a better composition.

I actually used some of my orange pastels and that is good.  Fall colors are not my favorites and the oranges and browns are very neglected in my palette.  Ha.

Some of our family were posting fall colors on our text chatting and we have no fall colors yet and maybe none this year.  Here is our "old" yard in December of 2008.

We went to one of the fall baseball practice for the Longhorns last Monday.  It was such a beautiful evening.  I took many photos and fixed some to put here then decided after all the time that I wouldn't put them up.  Here is one!  They played nine innings Orange against White.  The Horns won!  Hook 'em!

I am ready for spring  COLLEGE baseball now, professional baseball is not too exciting.  I was  sort of for the Dodgers or  St. Louis Cardinals to be in the World Series, memories of my parents.  We don't watch or care, really.  Now I am rooting for the San Francisco Giants because Brandon Belt is playing for them and he was on the Longhorn team a few years ago.  Do you care who wins??