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Painting the Soft Pastel Still Life
Saturday, June 14, 2025 (10am-1pm)
Cottonwood Center for the Arts
427 E. Colorado Ave.
Colorado SprIngs, CO 80903

In this beginner to intermediate soft pastel workshop, learn how to paint a bowl of cherries! You will learn how to determine values in a photograph in order to choose the correct colors for your painting, as well as how to mix cool and warm colors to create vibrancy. You will also learn how to create an underpainting by blocking in dark values and using a paintbrush and rubbing alcohol.

MATERIALS
Your instructor will supply easels, brushes, rubbing alcohol, and your reference photo. Here’s what to purchase and bring to class:
• Soft pastel set (Sennelier, Schminke, Blue Earth, Unison). Here is a set we found on Amazon. The strategies learned in this course will NOT work with hard pastels or student grade pastels.
• At least 2 sheets of pastel paper, 9x12 (Uart 400 grit in Sand is ideal…we don’t recommend Canson). Here is a pad of ten sheets of paper online.

The best place to shop for these materials locally is Meininger Art Supply at 814 S. Tejon.

Click the link below to register!

Register

In this tutorial, I'll walk you step by step of how I painted "Rose & Shadow."

1. I started out with 6x6 charcoal Pastelmat taped to a desk easel.

2. Using the reference photo (which you can see in the final steps below) on my iPad, which I found on www.unsplash.com (a great resource for royalty free photos), I sketched a loose drawing with a hard pastel.

3. I blocked in a very dark blue first on the left and parts of the right seen below. I then blocked in a vibrant red. I used my pinky finger to smudge where the dark blue and red meet to create a soft edge. I then added in a dark bluish green.

4.  Whenever I paint, I make myself remember that "two colors are better than one." In other words, although the rose is red, I need to add another color to add dimension - red is a warm color, so I chose a vibrant pink to add in subtle highlights. A warm and cool color mixed together really makes a painting pop. On top of the dark cool green, I added a warm yellowish green. 

5. For the shadow areas, I added a very dark purple and a dark blue and used my pinky finger to blend together.

6.  I always say that I don't know where I'm going unless I know where I'm at. In other words, I don't paint one thing first in its entirety, then move on to another object. I had to block in the background in order to see how that would make the rose pop and if any adjustments needed to be made. I used an ice blue. Two colors are always better than one, and I added a very light orange over the blue. The coolness of the blue and the warmness of the light orange created more dimension.

7.  These leaves to the right gave me some trouble. In hindsight, I should've taken artistic license and not included the large leaf behind the front leaf (in the end, you will see I did end up doing away with the back leaf, but I paid the price due to putting a light color blue over a dark green = mud). 

8. In this picture, I still had the large leaf in the lower right. In order to cover it, I had to take ice blue and go over it, which resulted in some heavy smudging. To make the painting more cohesive, I had to take my pinky finger and smudge the entire background to make it a solid color (the charcoal color of the paper no longer showed through, which is too bad because I like the paper to show through).

9.  Overall, I was still pleased with the final result! I like the soft edges. 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Happy painting,

Liz

In this post, I'll walk you step by step of how I painted Two Pinones.

Here are the colors I used for the painting (I really need to clean these pastel sticks!):

-First row: an assortment of various tones of cool and warm toned greens

-Second row: bluish gray for sky (covered eventually with purple-blue - not shown here, light yellow, my dynamic duo of dark orange and dark purple which I use a lot for shadows, dark blue, and black)

-Third row: dark red, very light orange/salmon

With the exception of the dark red, all of these are Blue Earth pastels from Dakota Pastel. This is the Nomad set. I really like this set for landscape painting. It has a limited selection of red, however. I think the dark red used is from Sennelier.

1. I started out with 9 x 12 charcoal Pastlmat paper and sketched in a loose drawing. I always use a reference photo. The particular reference photo I used was a picture taken from our recent trip to Placitas, NM.

2.  I started blocking in the shrubs and sky. I used black for the shrubs and a very light orange for the sky.

3. I added a blue-gray over the light orange on the sky. Then, I started added a mixture of medium and light greens on the right shrub. I used a dark blue green, light blue green, and a yellow-green. In order to make things look realistic, it's important to mix cool colors and warm colors of the same value. I always tell myself that I need to know where I'm at before I know where I'm going with the painting. I don't paint all the same things first, then move on to all of the same thing next (in this case, I did not paint all the trees first, then paint the ground). In order to see how the shrub looks, I added the path to the right. This gives me an idea of how things are starting to come together and if I need to make any adjustments.

4. Another piece of advice that I've always remembered is that a color is dead without its complement. The complementary color of green is red, so I used a medium red and added a few markings in order to bring the green to life.

5.  I blocked in a rust yellow for the ground - not wanting the foreground to look monotone, I added in a very light salmon color which is a bit on the cool side. The mixture of yellow and a pinkish color created depth.

6.  For the shadows, I used a dark purple and added hints of dark orange as its complementary color. There's little spots of light in the lower right corner of the shrub and I used the salmon colored pastel to dot these in. I thought something looked off because the gray sky I originally had was lighter in value than the foreground. I added in a purplish blue over top and thought this brought the background and foreground together in a more cohesive way. Here you can see the left side where I started blocking in the purplish blue and worked my way across the sky. 

7. And here's the finished piece! I added my signature with a black pastel pencil on the lower left, keeping in mind where a mat would be placed.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Happy painting,

Liz