Neo Deco – 08-08-24

This pastel drawing ‘Neo Deco – 08-08-24’ is an elaboration of my graphite pencil drawing ‘Art Deco Nude – 15-08-22’. Finally in color! Frankly, I couldn’t wait any longer to see how this design would look in colored pastel strokes. The concept was easy. Basically I transferred all cubist forms. In my eyes they were perfect already. However, I shortened the upper leg a bit. Somehow it looked a bit too long. Next to that, I also cropped the negative space around the body a bit. The model is positioned in a triangular shape. Hence, the risk of leaving too much space open, especially in the upper part. The final crop pleased me. Nevertheless, during the process of applying color I had some doubts creeping in. Shouldn’t I do something with the background, for example throwing some outlines of buildings?

Trying out New Stuff

As the pastel progressed I decided not to. The color scheme I intuitively forged together already was very demanding. You see, I bought myself a new Mungyo box of soft pastels. See what I get out of them. Buying such new art supplies always gets me excited. Different brands offer new shades of colors, just a bit deviating from the ones I am totally familiar with. Besides that, I also became curious how a Korean brand can add something of value to European and Angosaxon chalks. Now I can say, they are definitively worth the price. Not too expensive and they are similar to Sennelier. At one given point I even had to tune down the saturation by adding grays. Actually, this became the quest: tuning down again, so saturated and unsatuated pigments were in harmony again. Enter balances in warmth / coolness and tonality. A wonderful experiment. Pastel drawing on Fabriano Tiziano paper (50 x 65 x 0.1 cm) Artist: Corné Akkers