Sarah is a wonderfully enthusiastic and caring tutor. To her credit she tailored the class to a variety of abilities and needs, but it did mean that some got more of her time than others, but those of us left to our own devices were very well occupied because making your own pastels is a time consuming process.
First to narrow it down a bit, we had to explore our 'favourite' colours, most of us decided to do 'skin tones', to finish off the week with a portrait. Grinding down existing pastel colours, adding talc and chalk, and mixing to get the colour you want and then lighten for various shades. Yellow ochre, orange, peach for the warm skin tones. Purple and mauve for shadows. It took most of the week just to get the pastels dry enough to use, a coffee grinder on Monday would have been a bonus, I felt like the old apprentices in the art houses of Europe hand grinding colour for the master!
I had a crack at Sarah's method of skin tone mixing with oils and painted a quick under painting and even though it doesn't look much like Samantha now, it will. Still getting my head round the warm lights, cool shadows way of painting?
The portrait on sandpaper with the pastels was great and I think the whole class did some really good work.
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