Starting My Pastel Artwork

The publisher of my new penguin project loved the rough I sent. No changes needed at all - hurrah! 

It took me most of the morning enlarging the line work and printing it out, cutting my Canson Teintes pastel paper to size and then tracing the image up on the light box. Then, finally, I was ready to go.

Here I am getting stuck into the artwork. I laid down the background first, as you do with pastels and am just beginning to pick out features:

It's been so warm lately and it gets really hot in the studio, being at the very top of the house, but it's been really nice to have the windows open. We have Veluxes on both sides of the roof, so you get a lovely through-breeze. It's almost like being outdoors, if you use your imagination, because we get birds sitting on the roof outside too. Sometimes I hear scrabbling scratching noises - the toenails of the fat pigeons slipping on the slates outside the window!

This is how things stood at the end of the day. Still at least another day of work to go I would say, but it's getting there: