Publisher's Notes

For the past few weeks I have been talking about painting from a pastel palette.  The above photos are of one of the designs that I completed in the new palette.  This is called "Eggs & Shamrocks" and it is painted on the tin roof of an adorable grapevine bird house.  Painting with these colors wasn't as difficult as I anticipated it was going to be.   I started out knowing what color I wanted for the background.   I had the color pictured in my mind, so once I mixed my way to finding that color, I just had to find others that would make good companions.  I knew that I wanted to work with pastels, so I found the colors that I liked and then added white to them to make them lighter.  As I said previously, this almost ended up under my painting desk, but I pushed through by adding more and more shadows and highlights and I'm really happy with how the painting turned out.      (Photos are never as good as the "real thing.") 

The pattern packet is in my webstore www.thepaintingrag.com/tracy.   The cute birdhouse can be found at www.paintersparadise.com.  

I can already envision this birdhouse in the middle of my dining table with a few colored eggs sitting next to it.  I better get going and paint the eggs, spring arrives this Saturday!    Tracy