Pastel Skies

Today I was inspired by a Pema Chödrön quote, “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” How lovely!

As I reflected on this beautiful quote, I browsed images of skies and came across a beautiful picture of a sunset at Meenogahane Pier, Causeway, County Kerry Ireland by Sergio Vavilchenoff . I decided to capture the beautiful colours in the photograph with my pastels.

Pastel: "Meenogahane Pier"
Artist: Cindi Moynahan-Foreman

For this painting I used MUNGYO soft pastels and my Gioconda soft pastel pencils (that I had written about in a previous blog post). I painted on Canson Mi-Teinte paper (#470 Champagne).

Sky Studies

Karen Margulis has a great blog " Painting My World" and she sends daily updates by email (she has been posting from her current travels in Iceland!)

On her blog, she has written a very helpful post about pastels and skies.

In "Seven Days to painting Better Skies" Karen reminds us that "the sky is not always blue" and "clouds are not always white and fluffy". Karen suggests that to improve your pastel skies you could spend 15 to 20 minutes each day to do sky studies:

• Paint from real life. It's not necessary to go outside. You could sit by a window! Don't rely on photographs.
• Work small so you can work fast (Karen suggests 2.5 x 3.5)
• Cut your paper in advance and have pastels set up and ready to go to make it easy.
• Write on the back of each study: the date, the place, the time of day and the weather conditions.

I think that pastels are such a great choice for capturing the colours and beauty of the ever-changing sky. 

And what a great reason to take a time out of each day and look up!