Pastels were a natural progression from the detailed black and white drawings I did in school, I didn't know about paint mixing. I sold the B&W drawings, but could never get the prices up.
A very successful artist told me "you need to paint in color to sell, start with pastels, they are drawing also and the colors are already mixed." So I did and now have a 30 or so year love affair with them. I paint and sell in all mediums now, but nothing can touch the magical feel I can get from pastel! I get more money from my oils, but I try to steer my clients to pastel first!.
thornburgart:A recently sold pastel of mine. I Love Pastel!!
Pastels are an amazing medium, and I think by far the most challenging. After using oils, acrylics etc, I find it a challenge to get that same intensity as paint, and yet keep the painting tru to pastels. Great work!
Dominique
I started with pastels back in high school - the old Nupastels - hard as a rock. It wasn’t until college that I tried my first pastel pencils - Conte. I was hooked!! Now I work in all media, but for my pastels I use a combination of Rembrandts, Le Carre, and Conte pencils. Your work is wonderful - do you have a website so that I can view more?
Do you work on paper or board? I use Ampersand Pastelbord and Mi Tientes papers.
http://www.wildhawkstudio.net
To me Conte is the ultimate for fine detail, because one can sharpen them to a point. You can get a good point with a sharped Nupastel also. My absolute fave pastel is a German made Schmincke, They are the richest, most butter like pastel out there, when you lay down a line, its so rich, it looks like a oil brush stroke. Sennelier are great too, they have the largest amount of different colors. I lay large areas with the real soft, then finish with the harder pastels to form edges and more detail. I had trouble with Rembrandts, they had a lot of hard rock like places in them, but another pastellist told me I probably just got a bad batch and he loves them. I use all kinds of surfaces, paper, matboard, etc. I'm fixin to try something new, I saw a product at Home Depot called chalkboard paint, I'm going to paint a masonite panel with it and see if that will work for pastels. The prepared pastel boards you can buy are in my view toooo expensive. I'll let you know how that works, if it does work, it will be the most durable inexpensive substrate going. I show on many sites, the easiest way to see them is just to google search- <Artist, Matthew Thornburg>. Nice talking to you, I love talking pastels!
So how did the chalkboard paint work out?saw that the other day,,just a starting artist,and i love pastels.
I just signed up on this site. I clicked onto pastels (my favourite at the moment), saw this cowboy and nearly fell off my chair. This is one unreal painting. Regards Graeme
I think pastel drawings are the most beautiful and you can see the texture.
Copyright (C) 2013 Interweave Press, LLCUse of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms and Privacy Policy, updated March 2007
