playing with pastel and work in progress

It's been ages since I posted - when toddlers have ear infections, it kind of affects everything that you would normally do.

Anyway, here is some stuff that I have been working on.

The first one is a little pastel exercise that I did this morning. It is based on an exercise from the Australian Artist magazine and I liked it so I thought that I would try it. I got given pastels over a year ago and some pastel card and just haven't had time to really start playing with them. But this was fun and I can see the benefits of pastel and I like the vibracy of the pigment. I don't think that I would want to give up oils for it, but I think I'll enjoy playing around with it as you can do a lot with this medium once you know how (which I don't yet so better start playing more and reading more about it).

This second one is one that I don't know where to go with. I started trying and doing something a bit different and I was inspired by Turner and his capturing of the light over the sea. Obviously this is far from what he achieved but I did the sky and then I painted the sea, didn't like it so scraped the sea off. I sort of like the effect of the scraped off sea as it stained the canvas, But it isn't right and I don't know if I should keep it on my easel and keep playing or put it aside for a while and come back to it. The trouble with putting it to one side, is that potentially I never will come back to it and I do want to finish this one. Any ideas anyone?

Anyway, I think that I will play around a bit with pastels at the moment as I can do that at the kitchen bench while babies are running around whereas with oils, I can only paint when they are asleep as there is too much cleaning up I have to do before I can pick up my children as I have a bad habit of getting paint all over myself. I have a horror of sitting down on our new beige couch with dark oil paint on me. I have told my husband that it is likely to happen at some stage, although I am trying my best not too...