6" X 9" Soft pastel paintings - Landscapes

"Art is not what you see but what you make others see." By Edgar Degas

After a long break, I created two soft pastel paintings using my miscellaneous collection of

soft pastels. I worked with soft pastels for many months at a stretch in 2014 and the beginning 

of 2015. In the past few months I have been indulging in a lot of water colour artwork and 

the water colour medium is undoubtedly the most challenging one. 

With my water colour paintings I am still experimenting and exploring. However with my soft

pastels my technique is almost set. But I am open to trying out something new.  

Charcoals and soft pastels are both dry mediums and a lot in the painting happens as per your 

technique of holding the chalk and creating the strokes and blending. Over a period of time we 

all get used to a particular way of doing our artwork and that starts defining our individual style.

I complete my painting in two layers. In the first layer I usually do a little blending but in the 

second layer I normally use a lot of strokes and very little blending.

Apart from using soft pastels, I have also used Camel charcoal pencil at places to define a few

things such as rocks, crevices in mountains etc.

Road to leh

Soft pastel painting on Canson paper

Size 6" X  9"

Komic village

Soft pastel painting on Canson paper

Size 6" X  9"

My pastel palette

Which has broken pastels from different brands.

Both the above paintings have been submitted in the DPW challenge

I have a Two days soft pastel workshop coming up soon and thats

another reason for getting into a few pastel works.

My works can also be viewed on my FACEBOOK page.

Road to Spiti - a water colour painting

After having done couple of small water colour landscapes, I finally decided to take a leap and create a bigger painting.

The subject that I chose is a scene from Himachal, with mountains on either side and a road that curved and vanished in the distance. It was also time to test my new Winsor and Newton mop brush , which I had picked up couple of months back in order to create larger washes on the sky. The other brushes that I use are sable hair brushes from Himalaya Stationery.

Road to Spiti

Water colour painting on handmade paper

Size 10.5"X 14"

As an artist it gets difficult to control one's temptation to buy new art stationery. Everytime I visit an art shop I land up buying more than my CHECK LIST items. On one such occasion I had picked up the Winsor and Newton mop brush and a few other sable hair brushes from Himalaya. I had it in mind to use it some day and when I finally used all these brushes for the above painting it made me happy. Happy because I finally put them to use. Given below is the image of the four main brushes used in the above painting.

The brush at the top is mop brush from Winsor and Newton ( I paid Rs 1000/- for this brush and its worth all the money ) and the remaining brushes are manufactured by

Himalaya Stationery.