Tropical Confusion Step by Step

Hi everyone, I am back!

I have had a very sad and very tiring (6 week)  trip to my homeland, Australia. My dear big sister (Jan) passed away on October 27th and I made a rush trip to Oz on October 1st to be with her.

This has been a difficult time for me, and finally after returning to America last Tuesday I have had a hard time focussing. Lots of personal refection and tears, but it's time to get on with my life now.

That said, I got in my studio today and began this pastel .
Color is what I needed in my life especially. It always brings me joy.

So I began this pastel on velour paper called TROPICAL CONFUSION with a lot of color as you will see by the steps above.

I messed with two photos originally on my IPad to get a layered 'confusion', and with the bottom right step shown  above I again put my half finished image into my computer to see what background colors I could infuse to make the image come together. The image above (bottom right)  is the computer generated color before I started to apply my pastels on my own art piece.

FYI...I had tried dark green and a variegated  mauve before I settled on the warm blue/turquoise mix.

It's quite amazing what color does to an image, the dark greens made it a lot less HAPPY and probably suited the sadness I had been experiencing over the last six weeks, but I am glad I went with this colorful version after all.
I urge you to play with your IPads and any computer drawing programs you might have, options are endless to an artist, and it's way better than making a fatal mistake on the actual artwork.