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Showing posts from January, 2025

How Pastels are made by Hand

In a recent email from Wendy MacNaughton, she talked about visiting and shopping at La Maison du Pastel in Paris.  This is a great video about how their pastels are made...from centuries-old, handed-down equipment and processes!

From Helen Wells' Bold + Fold - Online Course

Helen Wells does a very nice job with her online course:  Bold + Fold.  Her instruction focuses on painting botanical impressions and putting them together into a concertina booklet form that she shows how to construct. That said, I'm not a painter of botanicals.  But I gave it a try by doing a fair number of 'floral' impressions in watercolor.  None of them were stand-alone pieces.  But there were bits among a few of them that I liked.  So, rather than creating a concertina, I chose to cut out the bits I liked and created this piece on a blank piece of multi-media paper.   Except for the black of the vase outline and the petal work around the pink circles, the rest were the bits glued on in a floral-like arrangement.  All the elements in the vase were created using different kinds of brushes and brushwork than is my norm.   What the course did for me - was to get me to paint that I haven't done in what seems like a very long time.  Some...