I finally managed to take my new French easel outside to do some plein air painting. (Well, I went out last week to give it a go, but when I reached my destination it turned out to be a wind tunnel and much colder than it had seemed when I left my house.)

I set up shop in Mercer County Park and began to work. Rather than using acrylic paints, my normal medium of choice, I worked with Pan Pastels (specifically, the 20-color landscape set). These are super-soft pastel pigments that come in small plastic containers rather than sticks and are applied by using special “soft” sponge-like brushes (or fingers, stomps, paper towels, etc.). I enjoyed working with the Pan Pastels as they are easy to apply and very soft on the page. However, there are a few challenges: the landscape set that I purchased doesn’t come with many darks, so it was difficult to get as much contrast as I would have liked into the image (note to self: next time, bring some charcoal). Also, because the pastels are so soft, getting any kind of a hard edge is a challenge.

I worked for about an hour and a half, until the mosquitoes (or gnats?) found me and I remembered that I forgot to bring the OFF spray!

Tags: pastels, plein air

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.