It’s February, a month of love and passion! Whether that be for the people around us, the sweets, or maybe it’s having a cozy evening doing what you love with someone special; making art together is a wonderful experience.
Shipped with love, this month’s box is packed full of top-quality art supplies. Including Fabriano Sketch pads, known worldwide for their excellent quality stationary you can make some truly beautiful artworks on some of the best paper we are proud to offer! We also provide you with a box of Sennelier Soft Pastels, these pastels are comfortable to hold and allow for large areas to be covered with a lush, luxurious color. Additionally you can enhance your drawing experience with some CarbOthello Pastel Pencils, which provides you with a finer point and the handling of your classic pencil.
Explore, have fun, and be amazed by the creativity within you!
Please SHARE YOUR CREATIONS with us! Check out our social media channels, give us a follow and post what you create this month (and every month) using Hashtag: #CurrysArtWellness in your comments. We'd love to see what you make!
Remember - our customer service team is here to help with any questions, or creative suggestion with this month's box or any other ideas you have that are waiting to be explored!
Video Transcript:
Hi and welcome to currys creative wellness inspirational video
This video will focus on soft pastels
Here’s everything we have included in the shared box set to do lots of artwork using the pastels and paper. We’ve also included these soft tools that are the perfect tools for blending. They have different tips and different widths so you can really get into some small places and cover a huge area all at once. I love using these along with my fingers to blend out my designs. I encourage you to get your papers out and just experiment with the pastels. Blend them out, try them on the pad of paper and the coloured paper we have included and just see how the coloured paper might change the hue of your pastel, and just get a feel for the different textures. So the coloured paper has a bit more texture than the sketchbook but it really comes down to personal preference.
So I'm going to start with a coloured paper and this one I'm just going to do a nice little sketch of some flowers in a jar. So, as you can see I’m blending my colours as I go. So I’ve mixed a kind of a light blue for the water and now I’m working with the pastel pencil. This is a great way to draw out your design beforehand and it'll keep some of the crisp edge when you fill in with your pastel.
So i'm just going to work darkest to lightest, so i'm going to block in my colours. Add some black for the shadows and then go in with my pink and my white. I’m going to use one of my soft tools and blend it out from the bottom up. That way it’s going to drag some of that darker colour into the lighter colour and really give you a nice blend. So you can just keep layering and keep adding in your colour, Pastel is really great for blending on the fly and layering your colours.
I’m going to use my pastel pencil to trace around the flowers to give a more sketchy look, and I’m going to do a shadow off to the side with this purple. I’m just adding another pop of colour and adding a little more dimensions of this drawing. So I'm blending that out using my soft tool and I'm going to do white on the other side just to balance it a little bit.
Next I’m going to get out my eraser so that I can reveal some of that yellow to act as a highlight in the flowers. So here’s my completed first pastel piece. And it looks great!
Next I'm going to work on a sketchy pink landscape. Try to make it kind of dreamy, and so I’m blocking in my drawing just with the pastel pencil and this will dust away as I blend and add more colour. I love pastels because you can just block in from light to dark, all the colours and kind of create a colour story before you go in and add more details. So now I'm just blending that all out with my soft tool again. And then I can use the pencils for a finer detail.
After blending it's just about going in and adding as much texture as you like , so just keep layering until you get your desired look. So I'm using my pencils and the tip of the pastels to do some short strokes to give the effect of grassy texture. And here it is!
My next piece is going to be inspired by polaroid pictures! So I’m going to section off these squares, and do just a little bit of experimenting in each square. It’s a good way to try out some different techniques and to just create some little pieces that go nicely together. So this one is going to just be a sunset with some clouds. I’m using my smudger and using my eraser to add the highlights. This one, I'm adding a flower and just experiment more with smudging and blending. So I'm going to go ahead and do the other two squares, and now that they're finished we're going to peel away the tape to reveal our nice crisp edges. And then I'm going to work on cutting those out into the shape of polaroid pictures. I like this design because they look like little blips of life, just moments. And they look sweet together because you're using a similar palette in most of them.
This work is going to be something you can do with the family or a friend, significant other. I’m going to do it with my son, so I’ve cut out a heart and taped it down and were just going to scribble all around it. It's going to mask that heart out, so then afterwards we can reveal it and it'll look like a cute little homemade valentine. So just letting him do whatever he wants to do here, experiment and just tell him about the colours as we go and he just does his own thing.
And so now I’m just going to fill in some of the negative space, well pull up the heart and then you can fill in a little message. I just put ‘Happy Valentine's Day”, and my son is going to give this to his dad.
My final work that I'm going to show you is a little more of an unconventional use of pastels which is adding water. So, when you add the water it dissolves it a little bit but keeps its texture. So it does resemble pastel still but also resembles watercolour! So it’s a great use for a background. So I’m going to draw some nice flowers on top of that, using a bolder colour so that they stand out and add more water to that. I love this effect because it keeps a lot of the texture while also smoothing it out so you can do a little more detail on it, but I'm going to keep it simple for now. Add my background, add in a few little dots and a border around, and I love the way that this looks.
So here are all the pieces I made, together. This was a lot of fun, pastels are a great medium to experiment with.
If you have any questions, please feel free to give us a call or an email. We're here to help. And, we would love to see your creations, so please show us using the hashtag #Currys ArtWellness. Thanks again, and thank you so much for watching! Bye!
