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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10 Reasons to Love Pastels: Just Add Water

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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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Flower Mania: An Inherited Obsession

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I paint flowers, I'm trying to grow flowers, I take pictures of flowers... I guess it's a healthier habit than collecting kittens that turn into full-grown, demanding cats ( which was my previous habit).


Flowers were a favorite subject for my late grandmother, who was my first art teacher.  All the women on my mother's side had prolific green thumbs.  My dad loves to grow flowers too.  I didn't inherit the green thumb, but I've been working diligently on growing my own flowers.  It started as a fun project with my daughter, and now it's become an obsessive hobby.  Maybe in twenty years I'll actually have a decent garden.
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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.

I did manage to teach my first paint-sip at the beginning of the year (hauling all of the materials in during a rainstorm that dropped an alarming amount of moisture!)  It was a blast, and we did the piece below in about 2 hours:

                                                     "Moonlit Valley" Acrylic on Paper
(We used canvas instead of paper, so it would be easy to hang at home.)

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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