Where are my pastels?

... 80% of the medium has to be (not oil) pastel - that's one of the requirements to enter any painting into the Pastel 100 Competition.

I timed it rather tight with the submission deadline being today. I had this in my diary for a while but the way things turned out, I was in Germany sifting through the murky depths of my rather confused computer to find pictures of what to enter. And I discovered two things

(a) I am a lousy photographer of my own work. Most of the pics are poor snapshots of various Work in Progress stages; and then there's nothing until it's framed. Incredibly useful.

(b) I was running up against the 80% pastel requirement with all the mixed media stuff I was doing. Most of it figures pastel but some rather sparingly so.

Well: there were two likely candidates but no useful photos. So I took my tripod out yesterday and came up - despite the greyest day in Glasgow since about 20 January or thereabouts (or maybe I just luckily missed six weeks of grey?) - with a reasonable setup for taking pictures. My favourite choice was this one from the Colored Sands series.

Colored Sands Series #1
Mixed media (acrylics, gouache, graphite, pastel) on board
33x33cm

Do you see the problem???

Exactly: far too many other things on the surface than pastel, notably gouache, bare paper and acrylics. I think even with a 50% requirement this would have been rejected. That only left this one here:

Three three one*
Mixed media (acrylics, pastel) on board
47x32cm

So, the only one I submitted is this one here. It has some acrylic unterpainting which does some nice things in terms of texture. It's the only 80%+ pastel I have. I'm a bit hesitant - even ambivalent - about it. I loved the composition when I finally got to it (see the Study Plains for some talk about it); I also love the lemon yellow and some of the lush marks across the blue fields and the skies.

And still.... I dunno.

Well: it's submitted in the abstract/non-objective category. Having seen the previous years landscape entries, I figured that the judges are firmly with my Dad on the unconditional need for landscapist realism, and seeing that I'm not, I better leave that one alone...

I now also have some good shots of some of the detail in this flickr set (yes, I know, a tripod is a much better option than my shakey, impatient hands). And I need to find a mixed media thingy to submit the glorious Colored Sands #1 to.

*An attempt at a less representational title: is it a landscape? No it isn't!