On The Drawing Board - Pastel Art

 Oh the joy of new art supplies! 

Many years ago I used to primarily work in pastel. It was due to a wonderful pastel portrait artist called Christine Fore who I met whilst living in Abu Dhabi. Christine set up an art group as she wanted to enjoy the company of some fellow creatives, though in fact she ended up teaching us how to use this versatile medium.

Over the years I found I really preferred using graphite for my artwork and the pastels got well and truly forgotten, I even gave a lot of them away thinking I would never use them again. However recently, I have been following on IG some amazing pastel artists and they have inspired me to create a few pastel pieces once again; I have also started watching some YouTube videos on different techniques artists are using with pastels - base layers with pan pastels, pastel pencils to get fine detail etc etc. All very interesting and inspiring! Hence I splashed out with the above new pencil set and have also bought various pan pastels and blending tools.

Below is the first stage of a new piece, I have just started some detail on her left ear and left eye. I blocked in the base layer using Pan Pastels and Prismacolor Nupastels, and am using my brand new pastel pencils to start the detail - do like that this method is far less messy! 

Below is the finished piece. Am quite pleased with it.

Like that the white mount brings out the highlights. 

And now in the frame.

Definitely going to keep refining these new techniques, have really enjoyed the process 😊