As some of you will know, I am the mum of a 2 year old and so the topic of nursery decoration plays a role in my life. As a fine art artist, I draw the pictures for the walls mostly myself and since we already have a pastel image of 2 brown bears hanging here, this ultra-sweet koala had to be drawn in the same technique. I have combined panpastel and pastel pencils and used pastel paper.
On this collage you can see that I drew the first layers with panpastel. In the lower two pictures I first dashed the dark hairs, went over again with medium grey and different brown tones with zwarten strokes. So the quite hard strokes got a little softer. In the last step I went over it with light grey, brown and cream tones.
I painted the background with panpastel and first spotted all the dots with a sponge. I also went into the gaps with panpastel, but i used my finer applicators here. In the last step I had to refine and rework everything with my pens. The background actually lasted much longer than the whole koala itself.
Pastel is basically perfect for backgrounds. Nevertheless, I will start with airbrush and see how you can combine the technique mi pastel. I’m very excited, you too?