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| Mitten Ridge View 12x12 Pastel by Michael Chesley Johnson Available |
A pair of scissors might just be the ultimate painting tool. When all else fails, cut.
Recently, I found tucked in the back of my storage area a frame that I'd forgotten about. It's square, which is a format I don't often paint in. (And that's probably why I had hidden it away.) Also, the frame held a sheet of glass. Here, I thought, was an opportunity to dig through my big plastic box of pastel sketches and to frame something nice.
But like I said, I rarely paint in a square format. And sure enough, search as I did, I found no square pastel paintings. Was there anything I might crop to a square?
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| Fresh out of the storage box - the 12x16 version. This was a plein air painting, and sometimes outdoors, we get careless with composition. |
Ah. I pulled out a 12x16 that featured one of Sedona's better-known rock formations. It was a plein air piece, and I'd kept it because I liked the color handling—but I'd never framed it because the composition needed work.
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| Yes, it's better cropped |
Once I'd put it on the easel, I found that cropping it down to a 12x12 did wonders for the design. To make it even better, I even reworked the foreground a little. One of the nice things about pastel is it is so easy to crop and so easy to rework, even years later.
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| Foreground reworked |
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| The final painting Mitten Ridge View 12x12 Pastel by Michael Chesley Johnson Available |
