18.5 cm x 27 cm, pastels on coloured-ground acid-free paper.
Date produced: March 2014

This pastel was done completely on-site, in Riesling Park, Wattle Park. I worked directly from the real scene at the same time of the day (late afternoon) on several days of similar weather conditions. The size of the pastel is small, because even though I was working fairly quickly, working on a small image reduces the time required to work on an image from direct observation. Real scenes contain an enormous amount of changing information. There is a very wide range of tones in the scene, and I needed to manage the use of tones carefully in the resulting pastel. I always find it inspiring to observe the subtleties of colour seen in a real scene. With full sunlight, there is often reflected light 'colouring' shaded regions.

Working entirely on-site is my preferred approach to doing colour studies with pastels. However, I have found that I can rarely get these images finished before the conditions have changed too much. The sun's path through the sky changes noticeably from one week to the next, causing different angles of shadows, even at similar times of the day. Even on each day, the angle of the sun changes at around one degree every 4 minutes (because of the constant daily rotation of the Earth, and its yearly progress around the sun). In the space of a couple of days, grass may have grown considerably (or may have been cut), leaves may have been removed or changed orientation, the level of moisture in the air may have changed, the colour of the bark may have changed, etc. All these things will change the colours in a scene slightly.

At around the time I was doing this pastel, I had been experimenting with working with photographs taken at the scenes that I am trying to record with pastels. The idea of using a photograph of the scene is that a photograph records a single moment in time. The problem with these photographs is that they don't capture the scenes with the same colours and tones that I would capture the scenes with when working directly from them in pastels or paints, and the photographs don't seem to capture the subtleties of colour that I can see fairly easily when observing the real scenes. I hoped that I could adjust the photographs taken to more closely represent the scenes I was seeing when I was trying to directly record them.

As it was, I did not bother to take any photographs for producing this small pastel.