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Soft pastel over acrylic and gold leaf - mixed media painting

• Stephen Lursen • abstract painting • stephen lursen

I am pushing myself to continue experimenting and creating new types of visual art. I will be quite honest and go ahead and say that I have no self-perceived unique style that carries from painting to painting, and I am ok with that.  I know that I could take any work of art I have made, create 9 similar to that one and then I could show a series of paintings that would communicate my "style". But, because I don't want to do that right now, I keep pressing onward.

I took an old painting of mine that was sitting on the floor of the studio and desperately wanted to change it. I've never liked it so I felt I had nothing to lose.

Here is what the painting used to look like:




I painted the whole thing over again with acrylic paint. I intentionally left the gold leaf untouched. despite hours of painting, I was never satisfied. I needed to make a change. So I put down the brushes and paints and decided to work with a whole new medium. I found Soft Pastels! I hadn't used pastels since a large scale oil pastel painting in 2006. And those were oil based and these are not.  So I basically had no experience with them. Exciting! :)

Here is the final result after working with the pastels. I am happy with it and glad I changed media.






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  • Cynthia D Ward on

    Hi, hope you don’t mind my asking, what kind of easel do you use ? I am looking to get a new one and want it to be sturdy, the H kind, but goes straight up for pastels. If you haven’t time to answer that’s fine too. Thank you, Cynthia

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