Pastel Abstract

The following link takes you to a five minute video exploring different soft pastel techniques in an abstract painting exercise. Take a few minutes to just enjoy working with the pastel making soft curving shapes and patterns.
http://www.artistsnetwork.com/video_preview.aspx?id=14137

Close Cropped Flower

Georgia O'Keefe is famous for her large oil pantings of extreme closeups of flowers. Cropping paintings of florals closely give them an almost abstract and very feminine appearance. The following link takes you to a sight where you can view many of her paintings of flowers. http://www.georgiaokeeffegallery.com/Floral.aspx

Here is a close up photo that I took of a tiger lily.  I cropped it even further with a  pen outline on the photo before I began to work on the pastel painting.

Unlike Georgia O'keefe I chose to work on a smaller suface 9" X 7". I chose suede board as the base since it holds a lot of pastel layers and has a rich smooth look in the final project. I sprayed with workable fixative between layers of pastel and finished with a final fixative spray when the work was completed.

The final project is brighter, smoother and softer than the photo. You can almost feel the velvet of the petals.

The following are photos of flowers I took and cropped upclose . Use them as reference material for your own pastel paintings or take some photos of your own to experiment with. Don't be afraid to crop the photos even closer to emphasize a certain element of the flower.

Glue and Pastel Flower Project

The following link takes you to an easy fun impressionistic flower project using white glue and pastel on dark paper. Above are a couple of photos I made of flowers that you can use for inspiration.

http://deepspacesparkle.blogspot.com/2009/04/chalk-pastel-flowers-for-sixth-grade.html

Here is my sunflowers piece in stages of completion:

The first step is a loose impressionistic drawing with the glue bottle.
The next step is to allow the glue to dry until clear.

The last step is to fill in the spaces and blend colors.

I think the next time I try this I'll use a darker toned paper this was a mid range grey brown and I would've liked more contrast.

The spoon daisy pastel painting was completed in the following stages:

Again I did a loose impressionistic drawing with the glue and then let it dry.

I finished with pastels and blending. I quite like the contrast of the bright flowers against the dark background.

I think I'll do a negative effect by doing the glue on bright white paper and using shades of a single color to fill in the pastel work.

I hope you are inspired to give this method a try.