How to Create Expressive Floral Abstractions This Spring

April 10, 2025 by Alain Picard in Art Instruction

Spring is a wonderful season of rebirth, and there’s nothing quite like florals to allow our creative spirits to bloom in new ways. I’ve recently discovered this magic myself by moving beyond literal representation to capture the emotional essence of a subject. This resulted in an expressive floral abstraction that speaks to the heart.

Alain Picard, **L’Essence de L’Amour**, 12x12” pastel on UART 400

Here are a few thoughts on my experience so you can explore your own floral abstractions.

The Power of Personal Expression

When you integrate design principles with color knowledge and your own unique touch, something wonderful happens. Your personal artistic voice begins to flourish, allowing you to interpret floral subjects with fresh emotion and perspective. Let your design ideas lead you in this exploration of the abstract. Then layer the poetry of color upon this foundation.

Soft pastels can offer an ideal medium for this exploration. Their velvety texture creates both delicate subtleties and bold presence that can transform a floral subject like pink peonies into abstract expressions of beauty.

Finding Your Flow

Successful floral abstraction involves listening and responding to what emerges on your surface. The empowering truth is that you can leave as much of the representational aspect behind as you wish. Some of us will hold onto more recognizable elements of our subject while emphasizing abstract qualities. Others will venture into pure abstraction where only color, form, and emotion remain. Each journey into abstraction can be as unique as you are, so be bold and explore.

Consider these approaches to enhance your expressive work:

Seeds of Design: Harness the power of value shapes as the seeds of your abstract design
Dynamic Textures: Allow the gritty, intimate qualities of your materials to become part of your expression
The Power of Scale: Larger works often bring new power and dimension to your abstractions
Multimedia Exploration: Underpaintings in watercolor or acrylic can add exciting and spontaneous new dimensions to your abstraction

Let Your Creativity Blossom

This spring, I invite you to create an expressive floral abstraction that flows from your unique artistic voice. Let your own personal design elements and color choices take root as your expressive side blossoms with new life. Move from observation into heartfelt expression as you allow how you feel about the subject to take priority over the facts set before you.

Whether your creative voice is just beginning to bud or reaching full bloom, we’re all tending this creative garden together. That is a beautiful sight to behold.

Pastel Clouds Made Easy

August 21, 2024 by Alain Picard in Art Instruction

Ready to master the art of painting billowing clouds in pastel? Dive into this video lesson, where you’ll learn techniques to bring your clouds to life with depth, texture, and color.

You’ll explore themes like:

Building Depth: Layering colors and sculpting masses with positive and negative shapes.
Edge Control: Balancing hard, soft, and lost edges for vaporous effects.
Color Harmony: Connecting colors between water and sky, using neutrals and chromatics.
Light & Shadow: Creating atmospheric transitions, adding warmth, and reflecting sky in water.
Mark-Making and Blending Techniques: Softening edges for vertical reflections and adding impasto effects.

Watch the Video

This video lesson has been newly edited and re-released so you can create your own stunning clouds that sparkle with life and color. It's packed with techniques and insights to elevate your pastel landscapes! 🏆

4 Ways to Make Your Mark

August 10, 2023 by Alain Picard in Art Instruction

Mark-making is the vocabulary we use to communicate with the viewer.

Through marks, we can speak quietly or loudly, be subtle or bold. Transcribing marks onto the surface of the artwork should be as unique as each individual. This is not time to hide behind excessive blending! Allow your creative voice to come through loud and clear in the conversation. Color and value are powerful tools in the hands of the artist, but marks transfer them from vision to surface.

Have you taken some time to consider the impact of your mark making?

Setting apart time to develop a personal vocabulary of marks is important, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating!

Here are four tips to help you foster a dynamic conversation with the viewer through your marks:

1️⃣ Experiment with Various Marks

The first step toward a broader vocabulary is to learn the various ways your pastel sticks can create marks. Experiment! Take some time to investigate and develop a greater awareness of the types of marks available to you with pastels. Consider how important the direction and pressure of each stroke is to the result.
Practice making marks on a scrap sheet of paper using the tip, sides, corners of your pastels to create a variety of strokes. Use bigger and smaller sticks of pastel to vary your stroke size, and notice how the harder pastels create a finer mark while softer pastels produce a more painterly stroke.

It may seem frivolous, but this kind of exploratory creative play will bring about new discoveries and broaden your mark making vocabulary.

The Linear Pear, 8x6” pastel on Pastelmat

2️⃣ Use Only Linear Marks

Create a small painting using only linear marks to hatch, crosshatch and stipple without any blending. This is an amazing exercise, because you’ll learn how to create shape and tone by layering the linear marks instead of smudging pigments around to create a gradation. This results in a dynamic play of color and a stimulating energy of line.

The Sculpted Pear, 8x10” pastel on Anthracite Pastelmat

3️⃣ Use Only Side Strokes

Another great mark-making exercise is to create a small painting using only the side of your pastels to make strokes of varying lengths and directions. This will help you to develop a more sculptural approach to pastel painting that resembles the brush strokes of an oil painter. Carve and sculpt the subject with your marks, taking care to use a light touch so you can apply multiple layers.

4️⃣ Make Your Mark!

After practicing a variety of mark-making approaches, it’s time to integrate these techniques and learnings into your work and make them your own. Create a small painting as a personal response to all the techniques you’ve learned, and celebrate your favorite strokes! Mix and match, layer and glaze, stipple and stroke your way to a beautiful finish that is both joyful and personal.

Let these four mark-making tips empower your next creative conversation, and may your marks be loud and clear!

Learn how to create expressive marks with master artist and instructor Alain Picard

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My Secondary Palette Box

May 07, 2013 by Alain Picard in Pastel Materials

In my last post I shared how I set up my Pastel Palette for Portraits today I want to dive into my secondary setup.

This is my secondary palette box. This box of six rows is organized by color families from left to right. Beginning at the left and moving right you'll see cool violet/warm violet, red and orange, yellow/warm green, green/blue-green, blue, and finishing with neutral grays. As always, I've placed light values at the top, and dark values at the bottom. This palette is wonderful for backgrounds for my portrait subjects as well as just about anything else from still life to landscape. My compliments to John Heilman for the great travel box from HeilmanDesigns.com

In our Painterly Portrait course we not only talk about how to create amazing portraits using pastels but we also talk about efficiency strategies such as this to make your painting time fun and stress-free.