What Inspired me to use Pastel Pencils

I remember getting my face as close as possible to the picture "How did he do it?". I was at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square London and the main reason was to study John Constable's artwork. I was looking at the Haywain and I was captivated! I wanted to find out how he did it, created these beautiful pictures. Then it popped into my head.. "I could do this"..The story is told on our podcast but let us skip forward to where a friend of mine asked me to do a portrait of their dog in watercolour. Well, readers, I couldn't do it. For me, watercolour just wouldn't work for animal portraits.I was shopping in a local art store and saw a box of pastel pencils and for some reason I just picked them up to try. I really enjoyed using them and started to apply the principles of watercolour to pastel pencils as that was a medium I knew how to use. The Pastel Pencils to my delight responded and therefore my pastel pencil techniques were born.When I first started off in painting, I always had Constable on my mind, although I was a watercolour artist and with watercolour you can't really do Constable as he was an oil artist. So I developed my own style, and the style of painting with pastel pencils developed from my watercolour work.With most of my artwork, it is a combination of reference pictures and my own imagination. A lot of my artwork are animals which you have to have a reference picture for. The background however or surrounding area can be my imagination. The background on the Rhino picture was painted with my imagination. On top of this though my style developed to the point where I wanted to create a feeling in a picture. The Pastel Pencils allowed me to do this as I found out over the years. When you first look at one of my pictures, they initially look like they have a lot of detail, where actually it is more of an impression of detail that I see - by doing that, you get the feeling.If I was to have any tips for artists, I would say stick with it. You can be disillusioned very easily so the best thing is to copy people as I did. The more you do the more you learn. I'd suggest trying all the mediums you can get hold of, pick people's brains and be inspired.  Before I start a picture I thoroughly investigate the way I want to produce it. For example with the victorian girls picture, I found the original picture which I liked but only wanted a section so I used my computer to crop the image to exactly what I wanted. I then thought how I could change it to work with my style and a style that everyone would want to copy. I make sure that the line drawing is right and has all the detail I need then I look at the base colours. I think of the colours that I might be using and have them all ready, I don't fixate on a specific set of colours because as I go along, the range I use develops.I hope that this article is useful and inspires others to try the pastel pencil. If you want to copy my artwork using my video tutorials then you can get access here. For those that want to try written instructions then my starter packs are a good place to learn pastel pencil techniques.