Getting to know my wall

My first image shows a page of my workbook where I've recorded my thoughts on the rubbings exercise which I posted last week.

This week I've been working on the colour and shape observation exercises. I can only apologise for the fact that these next two photographs have turned themselves this way around. They are landscape on my PC - obviously a quirk of blogger I think.

I'm no artist and I did find this exercise quite tricky to do but the colours (especially the yellows) are far more subtle on the actual page than they appear here. As I was dissatisfied with the results from some of my initial attempts (those on the white page) I talked with an artist friend which resulted in me buying a pad of pastel paper on which I tested the chalk and oil pastels again. This is the beige sheet of paper, and this did result in a much more textural finish.
I found the closest matches came when I added a pale grey to the mix and I'm not really sure why this surprised me as much as it did. My wall is an urban wall and will have been subject to many years of traffic fumes, and smoky atmosphere.

I found the shapes between the stones in my shape observation at least as interesting as the shapes of the stones themselves. I make a lot of needlelace and I feel this might make an interesting design for that technique too.