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This is the most charming hotel I've ever stayed at. It is an old mill which was there in Monet's days, and today it houses tourists who want somewhere to stay during their visit to the village Giverny and Monet's house and garden with that famous pond and Japanese bridge. I've painted Monet's pond and the bridge covered in blossoming Wisteria before, but I knew that one day I would paint the hotel too. I rarely paint on velour paper, but this time I chose it as it gives an old fashioned feel that goes well with the motif. Maybe I'll paint another one, with a wide view, it sort of "itches" in the back of my brain, asking to be painted.

I certainly recommend the hotel for you who like it both cleanly comfortable and romantically rustic. It is run by a charming couple (she speaks English), and has an extended garden with some exotic animals. A small stream is running through and under the house, for the mill wheel. Breakfast in the garden was delicious.

Click the link to see a larger image of Moulin des Chennevières, Giverny.

Some of our old paintings and sketches may frankly be rather bad. They served a purpose once, but now they're not representative of our skills. As pastel artists, we do not have to throw them away or burn them -- we can remove the pastel pigments and re-use the expensive sanded paper.

There are several ways to do that:

Brush off the dust. That is messy and gets a lot of the finest dust airborn and breathed in.

Vacuum off the dust. Works well, on sturdy papers, but can cause damage.

Shower it off. But it is difficult or impossible to dry it flat.

Or, go to your kitchen cupboard and take out the baking soda and use that to get rid of the pigments. The baking soda attracts the particles of the pastel and leaves the paper and tooth undamaged. There will be a bit of a mess, but hey, that's life as an artist.

Here's my video demonstrating the process:

https://youtu.be/vi6wycM5X0g

The Husband was surprised when I combined flowers (pretty) with onions (food, not pretty) in the same still life. But I had my reasons.

I like showing the beauty of mundane objects. Onions are organic spheroids which in a tactile sense combine satiny smoothness with density, and suckulent hidden layers, without which cooked and raw food would not be the same. (OK, I luuuv onions and how they elevate a simple fare.)

Dalias can be somewhat spheroid too, but consist of many soft petals which can take surprising shapes. These ones are what I call spiky, a contrast to the smoothness of the onions.

Complementaries are colours on the opposite of each other on the colour wheel. They contrast most with each other, huewise, and are used to tone down each other in mixes, or to enhance each other by juxtaposing or placing masses adjacent to each other. But in an actual painting, I prefer to not to be limited in my colour choices. The way I do complementaries is to choose objects and backgrounds which contrast in hue -- and then I paint them with the full spectrum of pigments in order to capture the light and the mood.

This painting is based on the yellow/violet complementary pair. Red violets in the flowers and one onion, and muted yellows of brass and onions. More blue violet in the shadows behind, balanced by some orange yellows in the sunlit areas.

The trick is to get something exciting into a "boring" still life. Contrast, of textures and objects and of colours, adds that something that makes the eye linger and explore the scene.