Pastel

This tag marks work made with pastels, pure pigment pressed directly onto a surface rather than mixed with a liquid binder the way paint is. The result has a soft, velvety look that can still turn surprisingly bold when an artist pushes the color further. Use this tag to browse pastel work generally, capturing light, texture, and small moments that often feel almost touchable, in pieces that range from quick studies to fully finished compositions.

Z.L. Feng

Z.L. Feng is a Chinese American watercolorist and professor known for portraits of Tibetans, Native Americans, and rural Southern families. He paints past pretty faces to find real character, earning hundreds of awards along the way.
Kurt Wenner

Kurt Wenner is the American artist credited with inventing 3D street art, a style he developed after leaving a job as a space illustrator at NASA to study Renaissance art in Rome. Pope John Paul II even commissioned one of his massive pavement paintings in 1991.
Tatiana Kashtalyan

Tatiana Kashtalyan is a Belarusian pastel artist and industrial designer who paints flowers, landscapes, and soft, layered color studies in her spare time. She has exhibited in Russia and now teaches pastel technique through an online school, with her work held in private collections across Europe and the United States.
Jian Wu

Jian Wu is a Chinese American painter known for realistic oil paintings and figure drawing, who moved to the United States in 1993 to study at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He has taught painting for more than 25 years and is a signature member of the Oil Painters of America.
Javad Soleimanpour

Javad Soleimanpour is a self-taught Iranian pastel painter born in Tabriz who has painted professionally for 25 years. Known for seascapes and portraits, he now lives near the Sea of Marmara and teaches at the Seven Art Gallery in Istanbul.
Marion Tubiana

Marion Tubiana is a French pastellist and wildlife photographer born in 1990 who has drawn since the age of three alongside a lifelong love of animals. Self-taught and working purely by feeling, she builds her paintings around the eyes of her subjects, believing that the gaze is where real emotion comes through.
Heidi Amenda Marshall

Heidi Amenda Marshall is an American landscape painter based in Michigan who works almost entirely en plein air, chasing what she calls the invisible landscape, her own emotional response to a scene. She trusts her first reaction to a place and lets that feeling, along with the shifting light and weather, guide each painting.
Harley Brown

Harley Brown is a Canadian artist raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who studied at the Alberta College of Fine Art and later at the Camberwell School of Art in England. Known for his paintings of Native American figures, he became a member of the National Academy of Western Art in 1977 and now lives and…
Kathy Fincher

Kathy Fincher is an American painter who spent her early years as a National Water Ski champion, representing the United States as a show skier in Japan and competing as a downhill snow ski racer for Delta Airlines. After a change of heart during a Bible study on marriage, she stepped back from competitive sports…
Pastel Painting

This guide traces the story of pastel painting, from its early use in ancient Egypt and Greece to its rise in the 18th century through artists like Chardin and La Tour. It looks at how pastel’s soft, layered technique blends drawing and painting, and profiles the artists who shaped the medium, including Edgar Degas, Mary…
Wojciech Krupa

Wojciech Krupa is a cardiac surgeon in Germany who has spent the last fifteen years painting alongside his medical career. He works outdoors with pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolor, capturing forests, fields and quiet paths in a calm, reflective style. He has held modest exhibitions in Bad Bevensen and at the state library in Cottbus,…
German Aracil

Germán Aracil is a Spanish painter born in Alicante in 1965, trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Art in Valencia. He is known for luminous, emotionally intimate portraits built on strong light, rich skin tones and confident color, and his work has been shown across Spain, the Americas, Japan and Europe since his…