Artiste peintre & Miniaturiste
Pastel is a great medium for portraiture, whether it be in the old technique with multiple layers or in pastel sketching .
I can draw a full length person or portraits of children, adults, animals. I have drawn one of my daughters and a friend’s son with his pet
You will recognize a pastel sketch easily. You can really see the chalk lines and the sketch lets the paper show , so the colour of the paper is very important. This technique gives a lot of movement and strength to the artwork.
I sketched a naturist friend at the wild coast of Quiberon and I cheated for one of the portraits, she had tanned a lot I modified her hair I made it long and straight and I invented a waterfall. That’s the advantage of graphic art, you can remove and add elements .
Pastel is an amazing technique. You can use it for quick sketches. Or use it the old fashioned way as it was used in past centuries with several layers usually going from a layer of hard pastel (I use the conté square ) then layers of soft pastel (for me Rembrand) and highlights of very soft pastel (Schminck)
Old fashioned pastel is fascinating, you use very opaque chalk sticks and you can get a transparent oil finish. It is a great medium for portraits. I can’t show you recent portraits as they are private commissions
About twenty years ago I started to paint children’s dreams, a little dancer who dreams of being a star, the one who dreams of adventures…. but these are the dreams of the well-to-do children . Poorer children have other dreams
These children just dream of being able to survive. their basic need is water and food
These large oils have all been sold, now I only paint these dreams (and nightmares) in the graphite and watercolour
