Deborah Semel Demirtaş

If you remember, “more water drawings” was on my list of “10 ideas”, and I have stuck to my resolution of not having any more ideas until I use up the ones on my list.

These two oil pastels are the first I’ve done since getting back from Portugal last month. It was refreshing to be on the Atlantic instead of the Mediterranean (or Aegean) for a change, but I was the only one in the water without a wetsuit – which might explain while I was only in the water for about two minutes.

In fact,  now that I look at these drawings, I realize I had forgotten that I was not the only one in the water without a wetsuit: The man on the left with the green towel also went for a swim for a couple of minutes.

In fact, his towel was blue, but there was already too much blue in his drawing for me. And in the interest of full disclosure, he was facing the other direction when I photographed him. And he was further up the beach. And the guy next to him – wasn’t.

(A digital camera and Photoshop are my 21st-century equivalent to 19th-century sketching in oil pastels… But I still love the oil pastels.)