Blog

I'm hopeful that I will be able to regularly share with you my artistic journey in the pastel medium. I love to teach and want to create a sharing/teaching blog that will help others gain insight into the artistic process, learn what I've learned so far, how artists make decisions, and pick up tips for your own artistic endeavors. I'm really looking forward to it cause I can talk about art forever! LOL

For the past year and a half I have been spending time every day, sometimes a good part of the day, painting with pastels, following great artists on Patreon, taking pictures for subject material, attending workshops, and studying the art of artists I admire. It has been a blast, but also a TON of work, frustrating, infuriating, and sometimes even detrimental to my self esteem. But through reading biographies of artists and books about the emotional and psychological aspects of the artistic journey I've come to see this is normal and inevitable as I put so much effort into transferring what I see in my mind onto paper. The more I want it the worse it can feel to never quite get there. 

But the more I paint daily, and I mean really daily, not once in a while, the less of a gut wrenching struggle it becomes and the more the positives outweigh the negatives. All the artists I talk to about how they got where they are say, PAINT DAILY. Okay I get it. So for the month of January 2026 I participated in a 31/31 Challenge on Jacob Aguiar's Patreon group, painting 31 "paintings" (or small sketches etc.) in 31 days. The improvement in my work and in my confidence and approach was noticeable and encouraged me to start this website and take my efforts to the next level. 

Tomorrow we head to Florida on a month-long camping trip so we'll see how that intersects with painting and with this blog. But it will be an adventure in any case. 

Recommended websites:

Jacob Aguiar's Patreon group: https://www.patreon.com/c/u18127540/posts?vanity=u18127540

Karen Margulis's Patreon group: https://www.patreon.com/cw/karenmargulis