Christmas Stash 2024

Happy Christmas everybody. I’m busy rushing round finding homes for all my presents before I go for my daily walk. But then I thought, why not also stick up a post showing off my art related presents.

Mrs Actuary clearly took the hint because she’s doubled the size of my soft pastel squad by buying all the pastels online heft of this photo. That’s sets 1, 2 and 3 of the Jackson’s soft pastels plus another eleven colours to fill any remaining holes in my collection after combining them with the portrait, cloudy sky and landscape sets on the right, which I’ve been using since my birthday in the summer. With lots of yellows, reds, purples and pinks in the new sets, I’ll be able to come up with some more colourful skies and add find new ways of desaturating greens and avoid the Haribo look. And generally I’ll be able to add some much needed warmth into my soft pastel paintings.

And then there’s this storage box too, which has a quality feel to it. It fits 112 colours; currently I have 111 colours in there (including a couple of dupes in the 56 I already had) but have already ordered a 112th.

No new art books this time round but I’ve put in an Amazon order for a book on painting landscapes in soft pastels. I’ll post a review in due course.

Sometime in the next few days, I’ll swatch out these new colours and post up the results. And then I’ll be back onto the soft pastels in the new year, hopefully coming up with some decent local landscapes that will work as exhibits at the Rose & Crown and/or as Landscape Artist Of The Year submissions.

Now for that walk.