Pastels with Grunt

I enjoys using pastels for portraits, particularly of the doggy variety, but more of that in another post.  In the hope of injecting my work with a little extra umph, Mum and I did a course in Scotland, organised by the ebullient and talented Margaret Evans of Shinafoot Studios, led by Tony Allain.

Tony is a professional artist from New Zealand who paints spectacular pastel paintings with bold colours and energetic strokes.  I love his work, you can find his website here.

Being a naturally slow and careful worker this was a revelation to me, we produced 4 pieces each day (albeit that some of them could stand a little refinement) but the process was very informative.

Here are a few of the pastel paintings I did, I hope you will agree that they do have a little extra 'grunt'

This is one of my favourite locations on the River Rye, near Malton.  I have painted it in all seasons, and varying states of flood.  It is really hard to get to, I have to stand on a very busy road bridge to take photos, and haven't yet found a spot where I can actually paint plain air, so most of the series has been done in the studio.

This is a newly found location, near Nunnington.  I will definitely be going back there.

This was outside the studio at Unison Pastels in Northumberland (we did an extra day there with Tony later in the week).  It is unusual for me in that I did an on site sketch, then did the little painting from the sketch and memory, without using a photo reference.

These next two were done from reference photos from paintmyphoto.com which is a very useful reference photo resource to work from when I just want a practise subject.  I normal prefer to work from my own photos, but I didn't have anything suitable with me.

 I very much hope that the additional energy obvious in these small works will translate into other media that I use.  I have already done two new dog portraits that I am happy with with much livelier application.  More in my next post…



All these small works approx 10x8" Unison Pastels on Art Spectrum paper.

My new set up

One thing that has hindered me from painting out with pastels in the past is how best to transport them.

I tried various boxes and small assortments but never had enough colours for what I wanted, or the boxes were inconvenient.

A month or so ago I bit the bullet and ordered a Heilman Backpack Box from the USA (on the recommendation of my good friend and excellent pastellist Margaret Evans. It arrived in remarkably good time (about 10 days) then I had the joy of loading it. I was amazed to get most of my stash of colours in, with a bit of careful packing.

This pic is my set up before I started the painting of Grande Casse that I put up earlier.
It is really sturdy, fits happily on top of my (fairly substantial) camera tripod, and the easel support is a great addition. I am really chuffed with it.

It has been up a couple of mountains with me already. I am still working on the minimal packing concept. Not a thing that comes naturally to me, but lugging kilos up high mountain tracks might be good for my weight but not my back.