Drawing Class: Pastels

If you want to get into pastels, don’t buy the cheap $4 box from Dick Blick. It’s $4 for a reason. We worked with soft pastels (not oil), and my instructor recommended two brands: Rembrandt and Sennelier (the first soft pastels, supposedly). She works primarily in pastels, so she should know what she’s talking about. She passed around some for us to try and that Sennelier went on the paper like buttah. 

We were instructed to bring in a photo of a landscape or something like that to make use of color. I quickly went through my flickr archives and settled on this photo of tomatoes taken in the garden of the French Laundry. It’s one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken, and the most beautiful compost pile I’ve ever seen. The drawing is more of an abstraction of the scene, and clearly just beyond a third grader’s ability level (the shading and highlights are all jacked…hey, there’s the critic again), but I like it! Maybe I’ll even frame it.