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What’s in your pastel collection?
Start talking shop with anyone who works with pastels, and you’ll very quickly get to one of the most popular questions, “What brand of pastels do you use?” My answer? I work with a HUGE variety of soft and hard pastel brands. My collection began with a set of Rembrandt pastels that I inherited from…
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Landscape painting with pastels | Riverside Pastel
I flip through a lot of art magazines. I look at magazines geared towards collectors and magazines geared towards other artists. I always find it fascinating to read about how a painter begins their work. There are the lucky few. The idea just seems to fall out of them. Sure–maybe they do some preparatory work that didn’t make…
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Recycling a plein air painting and a vacation
So the rain finally stopped. Excited, I bundled up in damn near every article of clothing that I had brought with me. Slinging my bag of painting gear over my shoulder, I made my way down to the lake shore. I surveyed the scene. The blue sky and late afternoon sunshine were peaking through holes…
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Pine Trees and the Golden Hour | plein air sketch to studio landscape painting
I have noticed a lot of blog posts about the golden hour or magic hour in plein air painting. I think the best, and the one with a great little tool that will tell you when the golden hour is in your part of the world, is from Katherine at Making a Mark. I had…
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Pine Tree Clearing; pastel landscape painting work in progress.
To start the above pastel painting, I pulled out a less than successful oil plein air study I did in 2007. The nice thing about using an older, not-so- stellar paint study, is that I’ve found myself less inclined to stay very true to the plein air study, and more willing to make changes for the good of…
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Blue Pot, Orange Begonia
Today, I was lucky enough to have a few uninterrupted hours to get into the studio. I thought this would be a great chance to revisit this wonderful potted begonia. This plant has been bringing a touch of spring to my studio for the last few weeks. The winter feels like it has been dragging…
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Forsythia and Copper Canister, final
I do love reaching the end of a painting! I had such a wonderful time working on this piece. It has been far too long a break from pastel this time, and I’m thrilled to be getting my hands dirty and back at it again! Work in progress updates from this painting Forsythia and Copper…
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Forsythia and Copper Canister, update #2
I’ve been digging through my boxes of pastels to find colors that I can use to unify areas of the painting. To do this, I try to find a color that can be applied to a few different objects. An example would be the light blue that I was able to use in the background,…
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Forsythia and Copper Canister, work in progress update
I finally got back over to the studio today. We have been moving from an apartment in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis, to our first house, over in Saint Paul! I’m thrilled to be living back in Saint Paul, but moving is a lot of work! Every time that I’ve done it, I swear…
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Forsythia and Copper Canister, work in progress.
Today I thought it would be great to have another dose of spring. I have loved forsythia since I was a kid. I have some great memories of a forsythia bush that we had in our backyard that you could actually crawl inside of. It was like being surrounded by sunshine! This is a work in…
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Pastel Field
Still more longing for spring… Here in Minnesota, we have had a few days with above normal temperatures. Then, things dipped back down into the single digits. This little painting was done a hand made pastel panel. I started with a piece of Masonite. I prepped it with 2 layers of acrylic gesso. Then, I painted the surface the bright orange liquid…
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Pastel Pines
When I woke up this morning, it was 10 degrees below zero. I decided that I couldn’t dwell on how cold it was since I was nice and warm in my studio. Instead, decided to focus on the summer yet to come with this little pastel color study.
