Dance Shows and Paint- Fri and Sat

In the last dance parent association meeting, I was invited to paint at the senior dance concert.

I have been stressing about it, figuring out how to do it.
I have no idea how to approach this.
While I wanted to work in pastels, I thought gouache would be better.

Also, Daya had performances at Manhattan Youth Ballet from Thursday thru Sunday.

Friday Evening I went to the Senior Dance concert.
Originally they had chairs for me at the front, but I have a light on my box o I had to move to the very back, which was absolutely MUCH better.

I used gouache and did some backgrounds and everything looked really stupid.
It was a gear and space experiment, and also while I have painted at live music performances before (they stay till) and also I have painted moving dancers before, I have never painted a dance performance and it's basically impossible.

I think I looked really stupid in public but it's one of those things that I can't care what people think.

Basically I tried to do/plan one painting for each dance, 7 in all.
At the end of the show I had a bunch of looked-like-nothing-but failures-5x7 boards with some colors on them.

I *really* wanted to figure out how to make this successful and not a face-plonk embarrassment.
And Friday night I really felt stressed and also like artistic crap.
Because I had no idea how to handle this situation but I wanted to, very much.
And also I still had thoughts of pastels and pan pastels in my head.

I did not sleep well. Like at all.

The show was livestreamed Friday night And I kept it on my ipad to use as a bit of reference from the backgrounds I chose and started with at the live show.

On Saturday morning I organized all the panels and did a little touch-up with panpastels over the gouache on a few of them. I also reconfigured my gear and packed panpastels instead of gouache.
And i packed a little sketchbook to do some figure drawing to get a feel of the live dancers to try and get some of that movement into the studio paintings.  And also because I didn't know what else to do.

I did have the luxury of the livestream to make decisions on the figure compositions.  It absolutely had to be a hybrid approach. I could not do the figures live. I still had no idea how to handle this dumb stupid artistic hole I got myself into.

I should have taken pictures of all the crappy backgrounds but I did not.

Then Saturday afternoon I went to Manhattan Youth Ballet for Daya's performance, which was fantastic.  Here she is! She would not let me take any more pics than these.

I was so tired and stressed and spacey after the show.  I treated myself to sushi and walked through Central Park, which was lovely.

Ok, Saturday night, time to go back to LaGuardia for the Saturday night show.

The setup was much easier the second night because I knew what to expect.

During the second show, in the places I had pre-planned already with the backgrounds, I painted colors from life (very quickly) using panpastels. So most of the backgrounds for the paintings were painted on-location from life, and then I did some few-second moving figure gesture drawings.

At the end of the show I had 7 little panels with pretty colors, each matched to a specific part in each of the dances.  Again, I didn't take pictures of them but I should have.

Panpastel over gouache is actually a very nice combination. The panpastel goes over gouache very, very nicely.  I had no idea.