Pastel Art Tutorials

Painting with Pastels – Module 1

Painting with pastels can be a lot of fun and very rewarding if you know the right way to go about it. Believe it or not, you can create beautiful paintings. So what are pastels? Pastels are sticks of coloured pigment – the same pigment that is used in paint. Pastels are applied to a surface […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 2

Surprisingly enough, you don’t actually need a lot of things to get started in pastels. Most important of course, are the pastels themselves. Welcome to part 2 of our 10 part Painting with Pastels Course, where we teach you the steps to take, so that you can produce beautiful pastel paintings. Today we will introduce […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 3

Welcome to part 3 of our 10 part Painting with Pastels Course. In this section, we are going to talk about the different types of pastels. ‘Pastels’ usually refers to soft pastels, as these are the type that are most commonly used, the most useful, and the type that give pastel paintings their distinctive […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 4

For all of the great characteristics of painting with pastels there is always one downside, and that’s the mess. The reason for this is that pastel sticks have a crumbly consistency and loose pigment dust inevitably ends up in a lot of other places: in the air; on your hands and fingers; on your clothes; […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 5

In this section, we are going to talk about the different surfaces you can use to paint with pastels on. While most pastel artists will use paper as their surface of choice, it’s perfectly possible to use pastels on other surfaces, such as archival textured panels or fine sandpaper. Whatever surface you may use, […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 6

We are over halfway and we have discovered a lot about the basics of painting with pastels. In this module, we are going to talk about some of the main techniques that you can use. There are three techniques that are very commonly employed in pastel painting, all of which are worth learning; if […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 7

In this module, we are going to introduce you to the importance of value. In simple terms, value is the lightness or darkness of a colour. It’s how far removed a colour is from its hue (i.e. the purest form of that colour). In art, dark values of a colour are called shades, while […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 8

We have covered a lot so far and in this module, we are going to cover something that a lot of artists have difficulty with. Should you use photos or not? Many painters use photos to assist their artwork. There are essentially two ways of doing this. The first way is simply recreating an […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 9

In this section, we are going to talk about storing your work, a dilemma that faces all pastel artists. Pastel paintings are both very durable and very fragile. On the one hand, pastel pigment doesn’t fade or crack over time like paint, so your precious masterpieces will still be just as vibrantly colourful in […]

Painting with Pastels – Module 10

We have now come to the last module of our Painting with Pastels Course. We have covered what you need in order to begin painting with pastels and discovered that you really don’t need to have very much at all, just the pastels, a board and some paper. So for a relatively small outlay […]