Loren Pratts Little Chapel

Loren Pratts Little Chapel - Yuma, AZ

chalk pastel on paper

11 x 14 in.

2022

Knowing that I frequently like to depict churches in my work, I was asked a few months ago to do a commission of this quaint, little church off the side of Route 95 in Yuma, Arizona. In front of the church is their father’s old motorcycle, which the family has had many memories and trips with.

I ended up using chalk pastel as the medium of choice for this piece and tried to keep as much detail and characteristics of the motorcycle as possible with this one. I recently had finished my work on my large body of chalk pastel drawings done for my senior exhibition, so I was most familiar and comfortable with this using chalk pastel compared to other mediums like paint, and I think it lended itself nicely to the areas like shading and color matching that were key components to the references and images I was using to create the piece.

I hadn’t done a chalk pastel drawing with this much detail at a smaller scale like this before, so with that came some challenges that I was not aware of when previously working larger. Detail was the number one problem I had going into this, but quickly I realized ways to get around this problem through avenues like using a mechanical eraser as well as creating a base layer with white to smoothen out my line work when applying to the bristol paper.