This is a wee celebration post! Do you realise we pastellists scored BIG in the October PleinAir Salon?? We did a pastel takeover lol!
There’s always an award for the best PleinAir pastel so happily, we can always be assured that we’ll see a pastel amongst the award winners. In October, however, pastel paintings also took the awards for these categories:
- Best Nocturne
- Best Drawing
- Best Animal
- Best Floral
In other words, pastels shone brightly!!
Did you miss all or perhaps a couple of the articles about each of these winners? Nooooo worries! Let’s see what the pastel takeover looked like.
Christine Debrosky won for her nocturne painting, “Monsoon Night.”
“The Southwestern rainy season; late summer is marked by very dramatic clouds, skies, and sometimes brief turbulent thunderstorms. We live on a hill and I can see storms that are over 20 miles away. That’s particularly exciting and inspiring at night.”
You’ll also see that artist Aaron Schuerr took home an Honourable Mention for his painting, “Laguna Lights!”
Read about Christine Debrosky’s inspiration and see four more of her nocturnes.
The Best Drawing award was taken by George Tsakiris for his painting, “The Little Wooden Horse.”
“When I decide to set up a still life, I start by choosing a basic object that inspires me and then I try to complement it with other elements that form an interesting composition. In this case, the little horse with its beautiful curves and intricate details was the spark of the idea for this painting.”
George won for his still life and you’ll see more of this genre in the full article. And, you may be surprised to see he also does landscapes!
Barbara Berry nabbed the Best Animal Award for the painting of her companion in “New Year’s Nap.”
“One of the things I look for when I paint is a combination of warm and cool colours in the scene. My dog was sleeping between two windows, one south-facing and the other facing west. Warm light poured in from the south and cool light streamed in from the other window – I could see both cool and warm colours on the ottoman and the dog’s fur.”
And lastly, we come to the Best Floral Prize awarded to Marcia Holmes for “Rainbow Water Lilies.”
Marcia gave this advice about entering the PleinAir Salon:
“I would say to others about entering: believe in your art, in yourself, and enter. I believed in this pastel painting and the first month I entered it, it received an Honourable Mention, then in October, the Best Floral. Invest in yourself as well: I did listen to PleinAir Salon Winner Lori Putnam’s advice, and it did make a difference. She encouraged us to enter multiple categories and I did!!”
See more of Marcia’s paintings and hear the inspiration behind her winning painting!
And the best PleinAir Pastel Award? It went to Aaron Schuerr for his painting, “Keyhole Panorama.”
“Keyhole Arch is an iconic scene, the subject of countless paintings over the past century. I made an attempt at painting it last year, but it might have been the most boring painting in the history of Keyhole paintings!” And then he went on to win this one. Aaron shares so much in this article!
Inspiring no?! So why not enter and let’s see if we can do another pastel takeover?!
Just click here and away you go. Good luck!
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Find anything with Search!
I’ve had a number of people write and say they saw this article or that article but they weren’t sure how to find it. I think the main problem is that many readers don’t realise that the articles I write are actually on our Pastel Today website (not just in an email to you).
So if you’re looking for a certain past article, click on the magnifying glass icon top right and enter the info you have and see what appears!
There’s LOTS of good stuff there!
And that’s it for this time,
Gail
PS. Next time I’ll have November’s Best PleinAir Pastel award winner for you!
