2025 Ultimate Pastel Playlist

Stay inspired over the holidays with these exclusive demos from five top pastel painters.

How to Add Texture to Your Paintings with Tom Christopher

Learn Tom’s unique pastel painting technique, featuring acrylic underpainting. This tutorial demonstrates creating texture using house paint dripped onto the surface, then enhanced with pumice gel. Finally, pastel is applied, showcasing layered depth.

Everything You Should Know about Framing Pastel Paintings with Joan Larson

How to Plan Your Paintings With Carol Iglesias

Carol will guide you through her time-tested approach of creating a thumbnail value sketch as the plan for blocking in large simple shapes, before layering colors. This will enable you to define values, identify the light source, establish a point of focus and emphasize color effectively in your paintings. You will learn to interpret your reference photographs for stronger composition and understand the relationships between color temperature and color intensity. This method will allow you to paint freely with a plan for your painting.

How to Paint Backlight in a Portrait with Hilarie Couture

Hilarie demonstrates her process for creating dramatic lighting in a portrait.

How to Add Texture to Your Underpainting With Eve Miller

In this lesson, Eve Miller presents an easy way to increase the depth and dimension in a landscape using 3-5 big shapes.

Tune in to Art School Live with Eric Rhoads for more great pastel demos and interviews.