Well for some reason I have the urge to get into my pastel portrait painting more deeply – so of course I had to get a few more BITS for my pastel set-up now didn’t I!?

First my big collection of UNISON soft pastels needed complementing with a BIG set of Prismacolor Nu pastels which are hard. These I need for doing very fine touches around facial features and so I got a set of 96 for about £100 on ebay.

Here’s a pic of them.

I also really needed a small table easel (my studio isn’t really big enough for a mammoth full size floor one. I find when I do people portraits that working at a vertical plane gives me better results – so I hopped over to Ken Bromley Art Supplies and got a Loxley Bamboo table easel – as shown for about £18.

Finally (not related to pastel) I had bought a new copy of my old fave book Watercolor: You Can Do It! by my hero Tony Couch. He taught me so much in my early days 20 years or more ago.

Now I will re-read and absorb again as my old copy had bits that I had cut out and stuck in photo albums so was missing a lot of important text.

Next – find a suitable image to paint!

Have a great weekend.