I've been working on converting some of my step-by-step pastel demos into short videos.

Here's one, about 45 seconds long. It's made from stills taken with my iPhone, so it's a bit choppy., and the colors are all over the place.

This is the revised version, with captions.

The yellows are finished, finally. Whew, what a process!

Yellows are always problematic because at full saturation it is at a value nine, very high, and has nowhere to go in the value scale when white is added. Very top heavy. Messes up all the color charts.

Same pastels, rotated a quarter turn. taken under a bright easel light. A good reminder that photos can tell all kinds of tales, and so can light.

On the left are some of the new pastels to add in. In the middle is part of the purple-to-red range.

In back are the grids for testing the colors. As long as I'm going to all this work I may as well make art , too. I've been obsessively making color grids since college.

This is the red-to-orange range, roughly sorted into values. You can see the little squares in the tray where they have to go. Looks like about three times as many pastel as there is space. Ugh.

High Light, October

I've been reworking some of my favorite Camera360 photos from this year, with a higher resolution and layers of controlled effects. Here's a before-and-after pair of a high street lamp back-lighting a spectacular October tree.

The original shot, below, uses a Cartoon filter at full strength, saved at low resolution. The final version uses the Cartoon and four other filters as well, mostly with low strength, and saved at full resolution. I liked the first one, but I like the new version much better!

Here is the pastel station in my studio. The natural light isn't great, so there is a full-spectrum clamp-on lamp above the easel. I like to have the  pastels selection right in front of the painting for finding the right color. The cabinet is a Stanton Cart from HomeDecorators.com. They no longer carry that particular configuration, although they have many others. It is only 14" deep, so I don't have to reach very far, (I'm short), which reduces shoulder strain. It's on wheels which occassionly comes in handy, although it is quite heavy full loaded. There is a little dust catcher tray that I made from foam-core under the drawing board.

Some Pastel Sets
Here are a few of the sets I've put together. The one on the far left is the one at the studio painting station. The one on the lower right is my smallest travel set. The trays are made with foam-core. You can see that they are all arranged with the same color configuration, so that no matter which set I'm using, I know where to go to find the color I need.

At this point I have far more pastels than I will ever use up. I still want to get more, of course, just to make sure I have the right color. It's like getting a brand new box of crayons.

Played at 4 times speed. Pastel Techniques Class Demo - Ten 2-minute paintings done in one sitting. Quick sketches are an excellent way to warm up and to explore an idea or color combination. The time goes so quickly that you can't be fussy or fearful. It's the most fun I have as an artist. The preparation time was WAY longer of course, and being a confident artist is a lifelong pursuit.