A white chicken crossing the cobblestones....

This beautiful chicken is the subject of my latest video. Just click on the image to watch it on YouTube. I painted this months ago and did a time lapse video but the actual real time was so brief, 28 minutes, that I redid it. I've not narrated the video so that it is an ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response).

I'm not doing these videos, ASMR, exclusively. I'm trying to find my best ground. While I like not speaking very much or at all during a project, I recognize that some viewers want a description of what I'm doing. 

This piece of Pan Pastel on black Stonehenge watercolor paper, 9 x 12  inches. If you hadn't noticed, I have completely abandoned sanded papers preferring the pastel and drawing papers, especially in black and tinted. Maybe it's because I began my pastel work on Canson MiTientes tinted papers over 30 years ago. I prefer the feel.

'tis the holiday season and much non art work needs to be done so I haven't been able to paint or draw except in my head. I'm hoping to create a piece this afternoon after the shopping and wrapping and vacuuming. There was much less dust before electronics.

Happy Holidays! 

  

We wish you a Merry Christmas!

 

Hello and Seasons Greetings. I completed my annual Renard Christmas Card and for the first time, I recorded it so the process is now available on my YouTube Channel. Click on either of the images to watch this video.

Here is the completed Pan Pastel paintings which I drew from life and a photo of Renard. The Tomtes or Gnomes all posed for me as I worked. Renard was downstairs sleeping on the sofa. I worked on 10 x 14 black Stonehenge hotpress watercolor paper.

In Sweden the Tomte is a farm elf or spirit of a long ago ancestor who is attached to and protects a family. The Tomte may live in the barn and is never seen but when you put out milk and porridge for this family friend, it is gone by the next day. This link is to an article with a wonderful explanation of where the Tomte comes from. Swedish illustrator, Jenny Nystrom, defined the appearance of the Jultomte in the many  Christmas cards she created. 

And here is the card. I used the image as a background on a single slide in PowerPoint, added the text and voila! I will print them on 4 x 6 or 5 x 7 cards. Which ever I have on hand. I think that this is our best holiday card ever! I love it. The artwork is still on my drafting table so I can keep looking at it and I finished it two days ago. I believe I'll have to frame it rather than just filing it away.

From Renard and me, "We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"

Imaginary Landscape.

I've done that all of my life as most artists do but this is art that has been inspired by meditation and journeying. So.... along with my wildlife and pet art, I'll be doing inspired pastel paintings and drawings.

Long story shortish. My art is reflective of all I believe and would like to know and understand. I'm on a lifelong journey with the rest of you and I don't understand squat. I finally came to realize that I get to understand it all when I pass. But I can't help myself. I still want to learn more and connect with my soul and reconnect with all the bits of my soul that seem to run away with every scary event. The one tool I have is creativity. I can connect with the Creative by creating pretty pictures. I love painting with pastels and sharing what I do with others. 

This video is ASMR. I do speak but, not too much,  and I use my telephone voice. Click on the image below to see this video. If you have any constructive comments, I would like to read them.  Thank you in advance for taking a look. It's only 33 minutes long. I was going to use a second channel but I'm afraid of losing traction and it's all about creative work anyway. I'm tagging this work Wise?Woman. 

 

A turn on the path...

 

It's been around for decades, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). I hadn't heard of it until recently although I had seen the initials and wondered for about 30 seconds. It was a Reiki video and I thought it must be a new variety. New personalized versions of Reiki pop up everywhere. The woman whose name I don't remember was whispering in what seemed like an imitation of Marilyn Monroe and was jingling her earrings as she chanted on about sending healing. The comments were complimentary. I made none and never watched another video because I found her whispering contrived and irritating. Last week I came upon an ASMR drawing video. Okay. It has nothing to do with Reiki. I looked it up and from my take these are supposed to be relaxing videos. Some may send you off to sleep. Well, I did find the drawing video relaxing and I watched a few more. Some I liked and some I didn't. I watched ASMR videos where people crackled plastic and brushed the microphone. They were okay and I might listen while I was going to sleep. In one article they mentioned Bob Ross and the relaxing effect his voice had on the viewers. I got it!

It was what I wanted to do all along and thought wouldn't work because people would want instruction. But I enjoy listening to the sounds of materials and pencils brushing across paper. So I published two and I have two more upcoming along with my narrated videos. There is no time lapse because time lapse rushes the eye. My thinking anyway. Click on the images above to see the videos. 

At any rate, I prefer to work in silence or giving little commentary while painting. In real time the viewer can see what my hand is doing; what materials I am using. I created these two videos specifically as ASMR projects. The others are videos I was going to narrate so I didn't. I am whispering in a normal manner in some of the videos I am recording now and in others I don't.  I'm trying to find what works best for me; what's most comfortable.

This is a real thing, not just an internet meme. Scientific American even published an article about it. This is the link:   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-asmr-real-or-just-a-pseudoscience/

Although my videos only date back to February 2021, I have been making and posting videos on other media. When I decided to leave the others behind and concentrate on pastels and graphite, I deleted the old ones. It didn't occur to me to just make them private. I still have them saved and I'm reviewing them to see if anything is worth working on. Some are in pastel so I'm still on track with my favorite medium.

I know when people, most people are making ASMR videos, they are planning around the repetitive sound. What I like is that I can just paint with my pastels and forget the instruction. I am trying to be careful to let my movements be clearly visible but beyond that, I'm just painting. I LOVE IT! or in ASMR  i love it .

A Puzzlement

And I'm back to bird studies using only Pan Pastels but using lighter toned papers. The red and brown bird is a finch and the bright orange and black bird is an Oriole. These will both show up on you tube as hour long demonstrations. I guess demonstrations is the right word. Whole I some step-by-step tutorials on YouTube, most of my videos are sharing my process, telling you what I'm doing sometimes and just chatting. 

I do teach art as part of my job as a librarian but I'm not quite sure if that is what I'm doing on YouTube. With the past four the four videos I've been creating pastel paintings for about an hour just chatting  about art, my process and stuff. I'm enjoying editing as well. I'm just keeping bit simple and avoiding attempts to make my homemade videos to some how be professional. That was way too much work. 

This is a wild new age for everyone. We can make movies, write books, create art and music and share it on the net with absolutely no background in production. I'm just feeling my way through , sharing my paintings as I find my path. as of today I'm up to 187 subscribers. Its a far cry from many of the YouTubers I watch but I'm so pleased about them and grateful to them. One of my videos has over 2,000 views and I don't know what I did, if anything to make that happens. I think I'm paraphrasing b the king from Anna and the King when I say "tis a puzzlement."

 

Portrait of Axle

 First there is the portrait of the mystery Aussie, a dog in the car ahead of me in the take out line of a Dunkin Donut store. I couldn't resist her. Well, I think the Aussie is a she. She caught me looking at her and ducked into the car and peeked out at me again and I took the shot.  This piece is done with Pan Pastels on black paper and as I declared in my last post, no pastel pencils save a white and a black pencil.  This is much more in keeping with the more relaxed, more organic style I have been evolving. I'm not concerned with photorealism, or tricking folks into thinking this is a photo. I'm interested in the light and the color and the emotion of the moment. Sadly, I forgot to hit record when I began working on this portrait. That's not so unusual. I just want to paint or draw or whatever I'm doing here. 

Now, I really wanted to do a portrait of Axle, a pitt mix who was a good friend to me when I moved to Georgia. He lived across the road from me and came to walk with me every morning before I went to work and who joined me every evening when I came home. Sadly, he died an early death when he was struck by a car he was chasing. This is one of many photos I took of Axle.  

Here he is. I did remember to press record this time. It's the first time I used my phone to record the video and if you click on the image or the word video, you can see it. The video is just under an hour.  

Axle belonged to neighbors who lived across the dirt road from me when I was living in south Georgia. He was friendly and playful and mischievous. He stole things like the door mat in my garage and my friend's swim trunks. Finally I have him his own toy and he brought it to my house. I rented a house on four acres with few neighbors and for exercise I walked them twice a day. Axle walked them with me.  He and a brother were found in a trash container and adopted by my neighbor. His brother ran away and the owners never knew what became of him. They tried to keep Axle contained but he just cried and howled so they let him roam. He never went far. He was only about two years old when he passed away and, although it's been a decade, he is sorely missed.  

I know that Pitt Bulls and Pitt mixes are feared and legislated again and with some reason. But while he looked more Pitt than the lab he was mixed with, he was more lab. He had a soft mouth. When he took my hand in his mouth he held it as softly as you would hold a child. He was a playful dog and a loving dog and he enjoyed the Milk Bones I kept on hand for him. As rough as his beginning was, Axle was pure joy.

Why I just gave up Pastel Pencils

 Trying to sharpen my pastel pencils has become a nightmare. Well a bad dream at any rate as I break points over and again. The best way, I suppose is to sharpen them with a blade but that that's a long time and is difficult for me. Then I remembered my Prismacolor Pastels. Hard and easily sharpened on a sanding block if needed. Fine squared edges. I had them and never used them. Not since I was in college or there abouts. 

I packed away the pencils and time will tell if they make their way to Good Will or back to my drawing board. I do most of my work with Pan Pastels, trying to keep the use of pencils to a minimum. I kept the black and the white a few colors that I frequently use in detailing but the rest are boxed away. The NuPastels give off less dust than soft pastels and no more than the pencils. 

I feel so much better. Tomorrow I hope to start a new project. Work today. Appointments tomorrow AM and tomorrow AM and tomorrow AM. Life does get in the way of my creative process. 

It's a process!

 And I love it!. This is the painting I created from Pan Pastels and just a few pastel pencils. Because of the architecture, the bird house, I used the grid method to be sure all proportions were correct. 

The video is available for your viewing pleasure. Just click here: Birds at the Feeder

Its really two time lapse videos; one of the drawing and one of  the painting.

This is the drawing I created from the following very poor photographs of our bird feeder. However, having done aa many portraits and studies of birds as I have, it was no effort to create an accurate depiction of the Bluejay and the Woodpecker.

My next move was to grid the original drawing. Now this drawing was for composition purposes only. It was by no means meant to be a fine art drawing. I used one inch grids on both the drawing and the painting.

You can still see a few of the grid lines in the drawing on the black paper. I drew with white pastel pencil.

This is my final piece. I am pleased. It is always tough getting started on a new project but once I start its like a day in the country or at the beach or breakfast in bed.  And I stop and go back and stop and go back, looking at the work with fresh eyes. 

I even changed my name on my blog and my YouTube channel to Joan Mansson. Pastel Artist. I feel so at home; all warm and fuzzy.

It's official! I'm a Pastelist.

In my continual struggle to find my place in the world of art media, I have finally landed on my feet. Wow. Pastels. Pan Pastels. Pastel Pencils. I've said it before. I have used pastels for decades and experimented with and hunted for my "best" medium. I've given away all of my pastels, all varieties, numerous times, going back to oils and acrylics; learning watercolor; inks; colored pencils.  What a journey and I realize that most of the experimenting was self sabotage. While I could have been improving upon and creating magnificent art with pastels I kept stepping back into mediocrity. Yes. I mastered all the media; well, most of them. I was looking for easy and difficult and permanent and light and heck, I just don't know. But I do know that I am finally, after 70 years on the right track. I started drawing when I was 2. I hit a snag in grammar school, fourth grade as I recall. No need to go into it but that's where I first used pastels in the form of colored chalk. I was good. I took to it naturally but I was seduced away to colored pencils and oils and all the rest. 

I think today about where I could have been and just throw up my hands. This is where I am. This is where I start. This rooster is representative of my pastel work. I painted it yesterday. The video is on Youtube. I have hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of art supplies ready for donation and gifting. I keep doing it but this is the last time. I feel so satisfied; so right; so ready. Today is the first day of my avocation as a Pastelist. I'm already a member of PSA. Juried even. 

I have printed out photos I've taken around of birds around our house and pulled out the pencils and pad and tomorrow I begin creating a composition for my next step in pastels. I am also going larger. In small steps. From 9 x 12 to 12 x 16 and 16 x 20. A lot of the constraints lie with my work space but I can do 18 x 14 with no problem and I have lots of paper and art board in large sizes. And while I enjoy pet portraits and bird portraits, I really, really want to create compositions of animals doing "stuff". Is that period in the wrong place? Oh well. I threw out my Harbrace years ago. It's so exciting. It's so heartening. It's so WOW! 

And here are some of the other pastels I've painted over the past few years. I was so happy with each of them. Each piece was a step forward in the process. https://youtu.be/WtF4pDsF9rM

  

  

 

  

 

 ... even my logo is a pastel portrait of Renard, Mon Petit Chien Rouge

A different approach to colored pencils

 

I painted this magnificent seagull using an oil based colored pencil and odorless mineral spirits on bristol paper. This was a first. First for this brand of bristol paper, first for this colored pencil and a first for blending the mineral spirits with paper blending stumps. It worked beautifully.

Here is my work space. All of my colors and stumps selected. The pencils, a set of 48, came from Art n Fly. I ordered it from Amazon.com. 

Here's a close up of the pencils and stumps. 

I came upon this method of blending with stumps rather than brushes on an old YouTube crafting video. I was interested in seeing if anyone had used pencils and spirits for create a wash. I never found anyone but I did find a few crafters from a dozen years ago sharing the use of the stump and the oil and pencils while filing in their rubber stamp projects. It was brilliant, to the point and easy. They each drew in heavy lines of pencil within the inked lines of the stamped image and then used the paper stump to blednd the color out from the edges to the center. So cool.

I did a bit of experimenting and saw how easy it was but being a painter I needed to apply the technique to a bird or dog to see how it worked on a larger scale. I've been meaning to paint this seagull for a few years but never got around it to. I don't know if it was a download or one I took myself in California or here in Florida. If it was a download it came from Wildlifereferencephotos.com or Pixabay.com. I take a lot of photos of shorebirds here. But I digress. I drew 

White Pastel Pencil on Black Paper: Barn Owl Perched

Here's the link to my latest YouTube video. A time lapse, just over five minutes of a drawing of a barn owl.

I used an image I downloaded from Wildlifereferencephotos.com, desaturated it and drew a graphite study.

I worked from the gray scale photo and the drawing to draw the barn owl on black paper with white pencil.

...and here is the final drawing.

Alcohol Markers Just for the Fun of It

 Well, a lot has happened to me artstically in the past two plus weeks. I decided to go back to working with alcohol markers and alcohol ink. I really need to have some fun and to experiment and that's what I'm doing. I've opened a store with Threadless.com and I'm selling prints of my work as well as designing some T Shirts. That's where the fun comes in. Just getting started and not very much to show at the moment. There are many attempts and failures and I'm still waiting for materials to come in so there's been a bit of a hold up in my progress. 

These are among the first of my designs. I'm hoping to get more interesting as I progress. We shall see.

I have been trying different papers and different materials and having fun with little progress but that's all changing. I'm just trying to keep the ink work simple. I'm not giving up pastels or pencils but I really just wanted to have fun with TShirt design and simple images.

Here's the link if you want to see what I'm selling at my Threadless Store

water color pencils on black water color paper.....

Here it is. My first water color painting on black paper. I worked sort of. I had great difficulty with the jellyfish and creating a sort of luminescence. Well, you don't really get that with watercolors as you can with pastels and oils but ....  and while the lionfish looks pretty cool, the deepening of the colors as I wet them worked against me. When I work with colored pencils on black paper I don't have to anticipate the color. It's there. I do believe, for now at least, I will stick with white water color paper. I have plenty. 

I used black Stonehenge hot press watercolor paper. Cold press might have been better but I think my color application is more the issue here. Good composition though. I didn't tape this project. 

Thanks for checking in:)

 

Owls.......

 The epic of the owls continues.  

I drew a picture of a barn owl on black Canson drawing paper using white colored pencil and black colored pencil along with a touch of eraser and exacto blade although I fund the blade to be ineffective. This was a fun and free drawing. I don't even remember if I filmed it. Oh well. I'll find out soon enough

Then, I just can't get the photos set up correctly today, I drew the photo on the top using Derwent drawing pencils on black Canson drawing paper. Both images are 9 x 12; well the paper is anyway.

I just bounce back and forth between B & W and Color and then between media. I went from soft pastels to pencils in three days and now!  Well now I'm going to work with watercolor pencil glazing. I did a blog about that a little bit ago. I really enjoyed the process and the outcome but it's been 2 and a half years since I worked with watercolor pencils. I even have a project that will look really good on black water color paper if the medium will let me. I have not have great experience with watercolor paints on black watercolor paper but I'm thinking, if I take the right approach with the watercolor pencils I might be able to make it work. I'll see. I was going to do a painting of a tiny bird but I think I'll start with he black paper and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. 

This is the composition I created on photos shop from a couple of photos that I got from I don't remember where a few years ago. Jellyfish and a lionfish. I'm looking forward to this project. I've never used either reference photo before so I don't have any notes on them. It could have been Pixabay or Lisa Lachri or even a trip to the local zoo or some combination thereof. 

Thanks for stopping by. I'll let you know what happens with this project.

I stopped the tape...

 ... so I could just concentrate on the composition. Worrying about the camera, zooming in and out and lighting not to mention narration just got in the way. I enjoy sharing my work but....the technical aspects sometimes get the better of me. For a woman of a certain age I have done well with keeping up with the technology that began about when I was born. Now I wouldn't mind having a large enough space so that I could have better camera coverage and I could hire a proper editor but I'm all I've got right now. Still, sometimes I just want to draw without the technology.

So, midway or someplace, while working on this white Pan Pastel on black Canson paper, I didn't turn the video back on. 

I downloaded four photos of the barn owl from Wildlifereferencephotos and did these drawings. Not good enough for sale but to better get to know the subjects so that by the time I was working on the pastel piece I really wouldn't need to pay much attention to the reference photos. 

I used my mechanical pencils, 3 MM (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B) on vellum tracing paper. Then I took to Photoshop for some cut and past. I created this first:

Then I decided it would be better to work from the reference photos so I created this composition in portrait layout for some reason. I could have changed it but then the owls faces wouldn't have been as large so I went with this reference photo. Did I mention that I desaturated all of the photos first so I didn't have to worry about creating grayscale in my head?

Now, this is a rough cut and paste. I wasn't trying to fool anyone, just create a working reference photo. I developed the background as I progressed through the painting. And this is the completed, finally tweaked painting of the barn owls.

I started out with lovely swirls of white pastel in the background. When I finished working on the owls, or thought I had, I erased away the middle of the paper and created a forest of pine trees a the bottom. I worked on the swirls at the top and turned them into clouds and then I created mountains in the center of the composition. Then I kept going back to tweak the barn owl in the front. I don't know how often I retouched the beak until it was just right but, it was a lot. I don't know if anyone but me noticed. But I did so it had to be fixed. 

Oh right. Materials. I used the round and oval Sofft tools, the baton Softt tool, an egg shaped sponge, a Tombow mono eraser and a plastic eraser. I used black and white Pan Pastels, and a black and white Caran D'ache pastel pencil. The eraser is a very important tool.

Thanks for checking in.