I finally finished up these drawings of Miss Natasha Enquist from our Halloween Women’s Art Salon.
I was scared to work on big drawings with pastels, so I worked on them to procrastinate when I was even more scared of finishing the pastel portrait of Iris!
They’re much too big for my scanner, so I had to photograph them.
Turns out photographing pastels is hard! I guess the dust sticks and grease sticks create a lot of surface specularity.
I hope you get the idea anyway. I am pleased with them, and working on them moved me along the road of using pastels and gave me enough confidence to finish the picture of Iris. Which is much closer to a true pastel painting.
We are lucky to enjoy visitors from the Bay Area so often here in Berlin.
I didn’t have the physical energy to set up a palette or the strength for the larger arm and shoulder movements of moving around the long brushes I use.
And I have a nice large pad of legendary Canson 
This year I came to feel that pastels could have the kind of power I want in an image, and the kind of creepy sexy cool style I love. It happened through seeing the work of artist