Colorful pastel portrait of a young women in the Fauvist style.

Pastel painting 10 inches x 13 inches

A couple of weeks ago the Great Lakes Pastel Society held our first convention.  I was honored to be a presenter speaking about the business of being an artist. We had some high caliber artists who did demonstrations and workshops. Brenda Mattson held a landscape drawing workshop and brought along some new Richeson products for us to use. I decided to take advantage of the reduced convention price and purchased their new 12o hard pastel set. Its supposed to be light fast and has a lot more colors than NuPastel offers. God knows I don’t need more pastels…but I couldn’t help myself.

I brought the set to our figure drawing session last week and went crazy with color. Our model, Angela, is a beautiful young woman with classical features but I wanted to push the envelope with my pastel portrait of her. After I got home, it seemed to me that I might have been channeling the Fauvists of the early 1900s…

Pastel portrait painting of a young woman in profile

Pastel painting 10 inches x15 inches   $300

Please contact me if you are interested in similar artwork.

This is my final portrait from the class I took with Vianna Szabo. Wouldn’t say it is an exact likeness but I think it is an interesting pastel figure drawing. Vianna encouraged us to use warm and cool colors and also showed us how to use a no-odor thinner to create a dynamic underpainting. I learned a lot from the class and now I will work toward incorporating her tips into my everyday painting.

Small pastel portrait painting of a young girl in profile

Pastel painting 4 inches x 6 inches   $80

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Our Pastel Portrait class this weekend with Vianna Szabo was wonderful! She started out with some basic but essential tips on how to draw the head using axis lines and went on to give mini lessons in drawing the eye, nose and mouth. She did an amazing pastel figure drawing demonstration using her beautiful daughter as a model. It was inspiring but also quite daunting! She has such an excellent eye for capturing form, light and color. Our first task was to create a small sketch of the model using our chosen color palette. We were not to work for a likeness, but more of a form and color guide for our larger portrait to come.

Pastel portrait of a young father teaching his daughter to fish.

Pastel painting 8 inches x 10 inches  SOLD

I just finished this pastel portrait for a client who wanted a special present for her husband on Father’s Day. They were very happy with the results. I am doing more and more pastel commissions and watercolor commissions and absolutely loving the process. There’s nothing like creating a piece of art that makes someone happy!

I’d like to offer a special incentive for my regular blog viewers. If you send a commission client my way, I will happily let you chose one of my small artworks for your very own!

Contact me on my website and we can talk!

Pastel portrait painting of a beautiful young woman in pink.

Pastel painting 8.5 inches x 11 inches   $200

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Marie was a wonderful model at our recent portrait painting session. She was a newbie, not used to the grueling hours of sitting motionless, but she did a fine job! This pastel painting was done over a 2 hour period with short breaks every half hour or so. After years of nude figure drawing, its fun to draw people with clothes on every once in a while!

Pastel portrait of a beautiful young woman

Please contact me if you are interested in portraits of people or animals!   SOLD

This is the pastel portrait of my oldest niece, Jessica. I really like to do portrait work from life, but these days, it seems that no one is willing to sit for hours while I layer the color on paper. Not even my own family!  I took multiple photos of each of the girls at Christmas break and used various shots to come up with their final portraits. I know them both well and I loved capturing the little sparkles in their eyes…

Pastel painting 18 inches x 18 inches Not for sale at this time.

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I go to figure drawing every week but I don’t get much of a chance to do portrait work. After working with the puppy portraits, I thought I’d try a human! My daughter Amanda was the lucky first victim. I think I got a pretty good likeness of her and I like the color pallette. I will be trying more portraits and will work on softening edges a bit more. That’s the wonderful thing about this art journey. There is so much to learn that it will never be boring…