Pastels are often thought of as fragile, easy to fall off or something you can only paint with on paper. Nothing could be further from the truth! Pastels have been around since the 1500s, and became very popular as an art medium with famous artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. It became downright fashionable to have your portrait…
Color is one of the most powerful tools in an artist’s tool kit, but it can also be complex and confusing. Teaser question: can you tell me what colour scheme my Cup and Saucer painting was painted in? (answer at the bottom of post) the fundamentals of colours, how they are created and how they relate to one another; basic…
Texture is everywhere! Your hair, an animal’s fur, the dimples in a golf ball, the spikes on a cactus or the stem of a rose, the rough surface of a rock or brick wall, wrinkles in a face or crumpled paper…. On Wednesday 21 November 2018 I will be teaching a workshop, using mostly hard and soft artists’ pastels, exploring…
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use the same medium that Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet and one of my favourites, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used? Pastels are easy to use, available in wide ranges of colours and one of the most direct ways of applying pigment to a paper or canvas. Hosted by Attic Studios,…
It’s October and I am back to doing the annual pastel challenge! It means that, along with a group of other pastel artists and enthousiasts led by Gail Sibley, we challenge ourselves to paint with pastels every day of the month. Paint every day; easy, right? Well, not as easy as it sounds! Doing something every day builds routine, but finding…
After not doing very much painting or anything artistic for oh, about 15 months, the challenge posed to me by fellow pastel artist Gail Sibley came at a perfect time. I was itching to get back to the easel, so to speak, and that was just the little nudge I needed. What was the challenge exactly? To put pastel to…
It’s been so long since my last post, I am almost shy to start again. I feel like a stranger, lurking around on my own site! A few things happened since I was here last (that was last July, in case you were wondering). So this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down, and I’d…
So we’ve figured out the basics about the colour wheel, right? Well, partly so. We’ve discussed primary, secondary and tertiary colours in Art Basics – Lesson 1, but the world is made up of a lot more than just those 12 colours. Reports vary, but the general consensus is that the human eye can distinguish over 7 million different colours!…
So you want to be an artist, eh? 😉 Because we don’t live in a black-and-white world, let’s start with getting an understanding of how colours work together and how a tool most artists still use all the time, the colour wheel, came into existence. In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton was the first to develop the colour wheel. He saw…
A lot of people I meet, when I tell them I consider myself an artist, tell me they’d love to be more creative and paint, but are afraid to even start, because they feel they don’t know anything about ‘the basics of art theory’. Well, I am here to help! Let’s release that creative beast that’s inside you! 😉 To…