Artist: Tony Allain

I saw Tony Allain's pastels in a magazine a while ago and loved his work. I just now ran into his blog. Seriously, his work makes me swoon! Gorgeous Gorgeous Gorgeous! Minimalist and perfect. Some have a vaguely retro look about them...they'd look right at home in Don Draper's office!
Look at these...

Federation Square, Melbourne  (detail at left...I love the periwinkle blue that he uses a lot)

Red Umbrella       Don't Look Back    Waiting    Art Lovers  
Green Light at St. Kilda

St. Kilda Tram

Pastels: Pat Young Workshop for PPAL

Pat Young, a member of Pittsburgh Pastel Artists League, gave a workshop today at 3rd Street Gallery. She talked about composition and showed us how to add more interest to our pastels with a colored and "textured' ground on our paper that's created with water and pastel. It never occurred to me to mix pastel and water!
My reference was one of the many photos I took in New York last month. I snapped the Chelsea Gourmet Deli on W22nd in Chelsea, right down the street from where we stayed.

Artist: Jen Evenhus

Click on the link so you can see the large version of this beautiful beautiful beautiful pastel painting by Jen Evenhus.

Virtual Paintout: Manhattan

It's been a few months since I dug into the pastels. But since Bill Guffey chose Manhattan as the source city for VirtualPaintout, and I'm going on vacation there next month, I forced myself to give the clay a rest long enough to make a picture.

It's not very good but I did achieve my goal of being more deliberate, deciding where to make a mark, make it, then move on. No blending with my fingers and I only had to brush a tiny area off three times when I made a mark that was totally off the mark!

The man up front is probably too tall, and the people in my painting don't look like the people in the Street View image, but they do look like people. Instead of the soup line that it is, it seems more like moms and kids on a field trip!


Paste the address below into Google Maps, zoom in, click on the map marker, and click on "Street View."
392 W 28th St, New York, NY

I really like this tiny section of my painting:

Margaret Dyer: Pastels

Margaret Dyer's pastels are great! Look at the hair here -- seven colors at least -- and yet it looks like hair. If I tried such a thing viewers would think the model was in the tub to wash off the paint that had been dumped on her! Click here to see this GORGEOUS painting in full.
Margaret's in France now teaching a workshop. Read her story about this session.

Virtual Paintout: Canary Islands

This is my April pastel pencil drawing for Bill Guffey's Virtual Paintout. This time we visited the Canary Islands. This funky apartment complex at 2 Camino Los Tableros, Moya, CN, Espana caught my eye. I proceeded to take major liberties with the colors!

Click the link to go to Google Maps. Once there, click on the red A and select "street view." Use the direction arrows at top left to spin around to find the buildings on the hill.

Pastel pencil, 9”x12”

Artist: Desmond O'Hagan

Desmond O'Hagan is a great oil and pastel artist. I took a workshop with him last year and really liked it. He's a great teacher, very approachable, and amazing to watch work. If you're in the Arkansas area, he has a workshop in May 3-5.  You can read a bit about my experience in the class.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Desmond O'Hagan leads a comprehensive three day workshop for pastel and oil painters on Monday, May 3, to Wednesday, May 5, 2010, in Gravette, Arkansas. A slide presentation will be held on Sunday May 2. For more information please call 479-787-5098 or e-mail susan@susanedgmon.com 

We're Not Worthy: JF Le Saint

Oh my. Picture me bowing down, like Wayne and Garth. I have just discovered the person who is the embodiment of what I mean in my profile when I say seeing the talent of others would be discouraging if it weren't so inspiring. Check out the work of JF Le Saint.
I swear, he will think I'm stalking him on flickr because I "favorited" a zillion of his paintings. His pastels are STUNNING.

Look at some of these:

The water! 

The color, the hands, the hair, the everything

The fur!

The freckles!

The expression!
Oh, just go get a cup of coffee and look at all of them!

DSfDF: Portrait of Karin Jurick

Jill Polsby organized a follow-up challenge/thank you to Karin Jurick for hosting and managing the year-end Different Strokes Portrait Challenge. Jill contacted as many of the participants as she could to see if they wanted to do a portrait of Karin to be included in a book for Karin.
My portrait is at left and you can view them all on Picasa.
Susan Carlin got fancy with hers...look how clever it is.

Virtual Paintout: Corsica

With so many holiday things going on I missed last month's VP of Mexico City so I made sure to get my Corsica project finished early! One thing I noticed about Corsica...the dogs there are absolutely fascinated by the Google car! Go see the other participants' images. Check back at the end of the month to see all the submissions. It's always an interesting tour!

Different Strokes Portrait Challenge

This portrait of Karen Hargett is part of the Different Strokes for Different Folks end of year portrait challenge. This may be one of my most favorite pictures ever (see the rest of my pastels here.) I sometimes do "loose" images, but when it's a portrait I try to make it really look like THAT person, not just A person. I'm not good enough (yet!) to do a portrait with a less controllable medium than the pastel pencils. There are a few angles that could be tweaked to make it resemble her more but I didn't want to keep working it to the point of ruining the surface.

 

Margaret Dyer's pastels

I attended a workshop taught by Margaret Dyer in October 2008. I love her loose style, yet everything looks exactly like what it is. Here's a really good example...
http://margaretdyer.blogspot.com/2009/09/spotlight-click-to-bid.html