Why I Started Painting

When her youngest child was a toddler, pastel artist Carole Elliott decided she needed some ‘me time’, and began fine-tuning her artistic abilities, enabling her to be the talented artist she is today.

- Carole Elliott

I have always been creative. From about the age of 12 I started making and designing my own clothes and continued to do this right through to adulthood. My brother was the artist in the family and, being two years older, his paintings were always a lot better than mine. It wasn’t until my youngest child was about 18 months old that I decided to attend an art course to provide some ‘me time’. Here I learnt all about drawing and tried my hand at pencil portraits of family members. Nothing like starting out with a hard subject matter! We were taught all about tone, shadows, highlights and perspective. From here we progressed to water colours and I found the paintbrush was not particularly my best friend. In fact, I probably would ot have continued with art if I hadn’t iscovered soft pastels. I have also abbled in acrylics, quickly returning to astels after discovering that I could not eplicate the immediacy of pastels..... nd I love getting my hands dirty!

Technique

I started using pastel pencils on paper nd then progressed to soft pastels, sing fixative between layers. I have ow developed my own technique of ainting in pastels which has evolved ver the last 18 years through trial nd error. I am sure it will continue to volve as I experiment with different ethods of applying the pastel.