I stopped the tape...

 ... so I could just concentrate on the composition. Worrying about the camera, zooming in and out and lighting not to mention narration just got in the way. I enjoy sharing my work but....the technical aspects sometimes get the better of me. For a woman of a certain age I have done well with keeping up with the technology that began about when I was born. Now I wouldn't mind having a large enough space so that I could have better camera coverage and I could hire a proper editor but I'm all I've got right now. Still, sometimes I just want to draw without the technology.

So, midway or someplace, while working on this white Pan Pastel on black Canson paper, I didn't turn the video back on. 

I downloaded four photos of the barn owl from Wildlifereferencephotos and did these drawings. Not good enough for sale but to better get to know the subjects so that by the time I was working on the pastel piece I really wouldn't need to pay much attention to the reference photos. 

I used my mechanical pencils, 3 MM (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B) on vellum tracing paper. Then I took to Photoshop for some cut and past. I created this first:

Then I decided it would be better to work from the reference photos so I created this composition in portrait layout for some reason. I could have changed it but then the owls faces wouldn't have been as large so I went with this reference photo. Did I mention that I desaturated all of the photos first so I didn't have to worry about creating grayscale in my head?

Now, this is a rough cut and paste. I wasn't trying to fool anyone, just create a working reference photo. I developed the background as I progressed through the painting. And this is the completed, finally tweaked painting of the barn owls.

I started out with lovely swirls of white pastel in the background. When I finished working on the owls, or thought I had, I erased away the middle of the paper and created a forest of pine trees a the bottom. I worked on the swirls at the top and turned them into clouds and then I created mountains in the center of the composition. Then I kept going back to tweak the barn owl in the front. I don't know how often I retouched the beak until it was just right but, it was a lot. I don't know if anyone but me noticed. But I did so it had to be fixed. 

Oh right. Materials. I used the round and oval Sofft tools, the baton Softt tool, an egg shaped sponge, a Tombow mono eraser and a plastic eraser. I used black and white Pan Pastels, and a black and white Caran D'ache pastel pencil. The eraser is a very important tool.

Thanks for checking in.