Your Eyes to the World of Soft Pastel Art
Posts tagged Soft Pastel Art
Pear and Pastel Connection
Jan 22nd
If you love pears, there is a great place for you – visit Pearathon website. They have collection of over 30 original paintings and the collection is growing. What is interesting to see is the amount of paintings done in pastel. There are over half of the works in soft pastels. This is unusual since the similar online galleries have majority of the works in oils and acrylics with a few pastels. Only conclusion that comes to my mind is that pastel artists love pears
.
If you have your own painting of pears you can also submit your work, and if folks at Pearathon like it, it will end up in the gallery. Your pear painting needs to be original, and not a copy of some other work or photo, and it needs to be already somewhere on the web.
Kari Tirrell: a Dog Demo
Jan 21st
Kari Tirrell is a self-taught artist who likes to paint animals and people. She paints predominantly with soft pastels and has a great love for realism. Kari is a member of the Pastel Society of the West Coast and the Northwest Pastel Society. If you like her work and the painting above, take a look at the very good and descriptive dog demo. Kari recently made a short video clip on youtube which you can find here.
Cecilia Watson won “Get Dusty” contest
Jan 10th

Cecilia Watson "Just Hanging Around".
The Pastel Guild of Europe is a society that gathers pastel artist from all around the Europe. Any pastel artist living and working in Europe can join the society by submitting 3 paintings. As one of the activities for the members they run a monthly challenge called Get Dusty. The theme for December was “Still life – artist’s own setup” and the winner was Cecilia Watson, a self taught animal and wildlife pastelist from Spain.
How to make Canson Paper More Lightfast
Jan 9th
Many artists complain that Canson Mi-Teintes paper is not lightfast enough – meaning that the color would eventually fade when the paper is exposed to sunlight for some time. The pastelist Marsha Hamby Savage who mainly uses this paper for her soft pastel paintings is explaining in her blog how to prepare Canson paper to endure more light. Marsha is an expert in using this paper while the great deal of the soft pastel artists, including me, are having nightmares where they are left with no sanded paper in sight.
Free Pastel Desktop Wallpapers
Jan 7th

Frederick Somers "Free to Dance"
If you would like to decorate your computer desktop with some soft pastel masterpiecies you can visit The Artist Network website. They are offering free art desktop wallpapers. Among the offered wallpapers there are 4 pastel paintings. The paintings are from Frederick Somers, Terry Donahue and Don Williams. If you subscribe to the Artist Network newsletter you will also get access to around 10 more pastel painting wallpapers.
Alcohol Wash Underpainting
Jan 4th
Tennessee based artist Paula Ann Ford, who specialized in beautiful soft pastel landscapes, shares her process of doing pastel underpainting followed by the alcohol wash.
“I normally use a dark value of blue at the top of the sky, then in the middle sky a medium (lighter than the dark) value, and then at closest to the horizon or in this case tops of the trees with the lightest value of blue. It almost looks like 3 stripes.
Then I block in the darkest value for all of the trees in the background. In this painting, I used a Mount Vision extremely dark navy blue.
Then in the foreground I use the same blues as the sky for the snow, but in reverse order. The lightest will be the farthest away; the medium will be in the middle; and the darkest will be in the foreground.
That covers all of the board and I’ve only used 4 colors…” read more on Paula’s blog




Barbara Benedetti Newton

