A Giant Pastel To Brighten The Day

Some days you win and some days the worry worts attack you. What I need to learn is not to get too carried away with any of it. Just do what you do and trust that it will flow your way, which is not easy for a control freak like me.

I will be potentially teaching at four art centers in the coming months, designing the curriculum in two, and found a sustainable side-line (Have Kiln Will Travel) to help small nonprofit organizations raise funds. Sustainable meaning that I'm not just donating time and art work, but have found a way to do what I do, make some money at it, and give the lion's share towards a good cause. All that is not bad for a former computer nerd.

Yes, there are days when someone says no or my emails are never returned. But there is really nothing else to do but stay excited and believe in what you are doing.

The image above is a large 5 foot by 2 foot pastel painting. I started doing pastels as a quick way to design my glass powder paintings. Well, they are kind-of quick, but man... pastels are expensive! I have spent over $300 on them so far, and working in that scale is really messy. The powder floats all over and onto anything near by, mostly because my style is very broad 'brush' with a lot of arm movement and the sticks often shatter and fly about under the sway of enthusiasm.

Years ago when I first picked up pastels I use to do little paintings where you smoothed in everything and most of the work is done just with the finger tips in a somewhat anticipative manner. In contrast now my whole arm and wrist swing wildly sometimes laying down whole fields of color, and using up 1/2 stick of chalk in several swings of my arm... fun but expensive at $4.50 a stick! The only way this style is antiseptic is if I wear a dust mask and vacuum every five minutes!

Anyway... this is no way to experiment. Below is a Photoshop version of a glass powder painting study.I'm about half way done with the study. With drawing tablet in hand I can whip one of these out, do prints of it at high resolution, sell the prints, and it cost me nothing to create the original. That's a much smarter business model.

Maybe I'll leave pastels for now, but the key is too just keep working and doing and pushing forward. No one is going to do it for you.