Painting the National Parks

"Yellowstone Lake" pastel painting ©Mary Montague Sikes

These are the first of my paintings this year that are focusing on scenes from our beautiful National Parks. For these art works, I used as reference materials photographs I took during a trip to Yellowstone National Park in 2006. Both of these works were created using vine charcoal for the basic drawing, then I added color, working mostly with Rembrandt soft pastels. For both these paintings, I used half-sheets of Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper in the Moonstone color. The half-sheets are 19" x 12 1/2" unframed.

"Yellowstone Lower Falls" pastel painting ©Mary Montague Sikes