Published Articles on Empty Easel

Pastel Tutorials:

How to combine oil pastel with chalk pastel

Creating a textured impressionistic painting with wet pastel sticks

How to create a highly textured pastel painting with acrylic

Using water as a blending medium for soft pastel

Choosing a surface for your pastel painting

Packing and shipping your pastel paintings


General Art Advice:

How to overcome a panic moment while painting



Advice for Artists Who Post Online:

Review: Redbubble.com (Online Print Service)

4 Reasons to Put Your Art Online (Besides Exposure)



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The Imperfect Butterfly

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When we're first learning to make art as children, we hear a few things that become familiar over time.  Skies are blue! Tree trunks are brown, leaves are green.  Butterflies are supposed to be perfectly symmetrical!

Well, if you take a long look around you, you'll notice that most of that well-intended advice was wrong.  Trees can have blue, purple, and green trunks-- or even red or yellow, depending on the lighting.  Leaves can be just about any color too!  Butterflies, while appearing symmetrical, aren't necessarily so if you look closely.  Most of the butterflies I paint from photos have damaged wings, which isn't noticeable to me until I take the time to examine the photos in detail.









So why do we hear the same advice being repeated to kids over the years?  What's the first question most people have when a child shows us a painting?

 "What is it supposed to be?"

I catch myself asking this with my own kids. I've tried rephrasing it into "What …
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Spring Awakenings

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After a long hiatus, I'm trying to get back into a more productive cycle, which means more painting, creating lessons and teaching, and taking my work out of the house to events.

It's not that I haven't been busy, but I've gotten sort of sidetracked with fun pursuits like gardening, sewing, and breaking up fights between my children.

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If you're in the North San Diego County or Southwest Riverside County area and would like to do a paint-sip event, please contact me for samples and prices at nicolehilsabeck@yahoo.com.

Since it's now April, it's a busy month for all th…
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Well, in honor of being almost to my 200th post on this blog, I thought I'd do a series: 10 Reasons to Love Pastels. Since I spend most of my time scrubbing chalk into my paintings, I'll be focusing on chalk pastels for these posts, and how I've learned to love so many things about them over the last (gulp) nine years of painting with soft pastel.

Reason #10 to love soft pastels: they can be blended with water!

Chalk pastels are easy to blend with water, by taking a dry pastel painting (on watercolor paper or canvas) and brushing with water.  Click here to see a detailed tutorial on using this method.

You can also paint with wet pastel sticks directly on canvas, or press dry pastel sticks onto a wet paper or canvas to get a unique effect:
There are days when I feel like brushing paint with water, but don't have time to mix colors or clean up brushes.  A quick fix for that feeling is to tape down some watercolor paper (or grab a flat canvas) and begin blocking in a pain…
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