Pieces of Sky

I've been working with pastel a lot lately.  I had been doing plein air with oil paints but made a shift back to chalk pastel.  The switch from oil was only because there were mass swarms of little black bugs, and I had to mercy kill a lot of them because they would fly into my painting and get covered with paint.  There was no chance of them ever flying again.  I don't like to kill anything, not even mercy killing.  My grandfather taught me when I was little not to step on ants for fun because they have souls like any other living thing.  Since then, I have huge problem with killing bugs, which is actually where my student film came from.  There was a 5 legged spider living in my parents basement.  I loved watching that spider walk around, he was so awkward! But then I found out somebody killed him... Devastating.  Anyways the switch to pastel did cut down on the amount of bug killings, however there were still a few fatalities-- I squashed some bugs that I didn't know were trapped between the papers of my pastel sketch book...  Now I have a permanent record of those deaths.