The Dusty Butterfly

my attempt in chalk pastels.

The Dusty Butterfly    

So this month the painting challenge on” Paint & Draw together” blog is a beautiful white butterfly on a lovely red flower.( see below) Only one other artist has submitted a painting or drawing so far and his was a beautiful pastel drawing rather than a painting.

Now I recently had bought a set of chalk pastels. The colors are beautiful . All in a lovely box of 24. I had drawn with oil pastels a very long while ago in fact when I was in college in Montreal but never really took to it as it becomes a very messy way of drawing. Oil and sticky fingers all over the place not to mention oily fingerprints where you don't want them.

Maybe I thought chalk pastels would be easier to work with. Wrong!

The challenge photograph

I took the picture of the butterfly hovering over a pretty red flower and sat down with my new chalk pastels, I had watched a few YouTube videos of pastel drawing and it really didn't look too difficult. I did notice that the artists using the pastels had very large boxes of pastels all broken up and looking pretty messy. That should have given me a clue this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. And I was so right ! using chalk pastels is just as dirty and difficult as using oil pastels. In no time I had the green where the white would be and a combination of dust and marks all in the wrong places. Part of the technique is to rub the colors together on the drawing to make the proper tone you need . My tones were not correct and the chalk dust was everywhere . To cap it all my beautiful new box of pastels did not include black which I really needed for this drawing. Also they had forgotten to put a black chalk in my lovely box of pastels, A necessary ingredient for this drawing.

So it was not a good experience.

I think I'll stick with painting.