Michelle Therrien

I have never painted in gouache before but I love the matt finish and thought it was time to try it.

Arteza Gouache comes in 60 colors and I had to have the complete set cause who doesn’t want all the colors. It is also available in smaller sets as well but the 60 color set was about 34.00 on Amazon.

You can’t go wrong for that price.

This is not professional artist grade gouache but it will do for now.

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Gail Sibley’s Website

I stumbled across Sandra Burshell from an interview on Gail Sibley’s website. You can find her at How to Pastel.

Gail Sibley is a wonderful pastel artist she has a very informative website. You can find classes, interviews and lots of information on pastel painting.

You can also visit her youtube channel here.

Her youtube is also full of pastel videos, how to’s, and interviews with other wonderful pastel artists.

The Interview with Sandra Burshell

You can read the interview with Sandra Burshell here on Gail’s blog.

Sandra takes these little clips of life and paints them up in pastels. She calls them roomscapes. They are a small glimpse of time, a place, a person a moment where she captures the atmosphere and the feeling of that particular moment in time.

It could be something as simple as capturing the way sunlight enters a room as in her painting below.

Each one of these roomscapes captures the places where light is a part of the space. There is a unique comfort about her paintings as if they are a place all of us can relate to in the quiet spaces of our own lives.

And at the same time, she seems to also bring us back to yesterday in these places where her painting style just draws you into this fleeting moment in time.

I am intrigued by her subject matter and her particular style of painting.

Scroll down the article

If you scroll down the article you will see a glimpse into how she paints.

She walks you through how she painted her painting with the girl asleep on the sofa.

She edits her original photos so that she can paint just those parts that speak to her. Under-paintings are added that bring the vibrancy of the colors to life using complementary colors under her pastels.

I have not tried this form of under-painting but the look and effect certainly bring much to the finished painting. The colors are more vibrant and rich.

Maybe there is some experimentation to be done with this approach.

I also love the way she applies the pastels in such a scribbley manner, it brings energy and movement to the painting and parts of the warm under-painting to show through connecting it all together in her unique way.

Her center of interest is often the warm glow in the setting. We have all felt a place like this in our lives. To me, there is a softness, a comfort that makes me want to be a part of that room.

Challenge your comfort zone

Sandra talks about venturing outside your comfort zone. I think we learn more when we try things that are new, things that stretch our imaginations and our skills.

Whether we turn out a good piece is not the point.

To grow we need to not only enjoy the process itself but we also need to feed it new things and fill it with wonder. I always want to figure out how to achieve new techniques and styles that broaden my own style.

Explore the unknown, get messy, use the new information and see what comes out of you.

My thoughts

Other artists inspire me. I love tutorials or interviews where an artist shares their thoughts. It is so interesting to hear what makes them come alive in their art. How do they see the world? What little moment of life do they capture in their work and why?

What is their process and how can I use that inspiration to try new things in my own art. What new things will I find by exploring a new technique? I don’t have those answers but I sure love the journey. It’s exciting to fill your head with new ideas and possibilities.

About Les Darlow

Les Darlow is a pastel painter who lives in the UK. He paints what I would call semi-abstract landscapes. His paintings are vibrant, fresh and full of energy, movement, and light.

I came across him via facebook and was immediately taken at first by his skies.

I love the sky and clouds it all just draws me in. There is something peaceful and meditative about enjoying a beautiful sky and there is even something better about being able to paint one is such a way as to draw the viewer in.

This now meant I had to visit his website, check it out here.

Much to my delight, I found he had just published a book called Absolute Pastels.

Buy his book

On his site you can purchase the book here.

It is available as a printed book you can purchase or as a digital book.

You can also purchase the digital book with disk option and you will not only get his wonderful book but you will also get the 5 videos of the projects in the book.

I highly recommend the book and disk option so you can watch him paint these wonderful landscapes.

His package is full of lots of info, videos and pdfs to inspire you to try your hand at his style of painting.

What I found in his books

In this book, he talks about composition and how you can take your photos and choose the right parts to paint just the right landscape. There is also a lot of information on value and how to use that in your painting so you don’t make a flat painting.

There are a couple of paintings in soft pastels and also a couple in panpastels. You get to see how to create this glowing landscapes in both pastels options.

Watch him paint and see how he lays the pastel on the canvas and just how much he leaves out of the painting and manages to capture a beautiful feeling in every landscape he paints.

There are also pdfs of the lessons. You get so much value for you money.

Going from detail painting to looser painting style

I am what I call a fiddler, my brain loves to fiddle with all the details and I could just go with that and do realism and high detail very well. But that is not what makes my creative juices flow. Loose semi-abstract where you capture the essence of a place is where my heart truly lies.

Les Darlow was a scientific illustrator, the kind that does exquisite highly detailed illustration for like medical illustration.

If he can go from so detail oriented then I can also find a way to embrace a looser form of capturing the essence of places in pastel.

His book has given me a place to start and watching him paint has provided me with a better way to understand how to achieve better landscapes in pastels.

Why I love tutorials

Online tutorials are the next best thing to sitting next to the artist and watching them paint. I can’t travel to the UK, even though I would love to take a workshop with him, and this allows me to peek into how he does his art.

I also feel that each tutorial gives you lots of information about the artist technique and thoughts. It fills my head up with ideas and helps me see things in a new way.

There is a learning curve to each new thing we desire to learn and I feel tutorials kind of help shorten the learning curve a bit. It is an investment in you, it helps you progress in your art and your thought process.

Without tutorials I would not be where I am today and even though I have so far to go in the things I want to be artistically successful at, I am enjoying the process and learning all I can.

I highly recommend Les Darlow’s book and disk set. You won’t be sorry you invested in it.