This year for Painting Padiham Plein air competition I decided to challenge myself to using pastels instead of doing a painting.

I am pretty new to using pastels so knew it would be a bit of a risk but I like to give myself a challenge!

I decided to do some practice in the run up and so found some old reference photos on my computer to work from. Firstly I created this pastel and conte crayon view of the front of Gawthorpe Hall.

For my second practice I wanted to try doing a mixed media piece with an acrylic under painting and pastels on top.

At this point I was still unsure which approach I liked better so I decided to be open to both options on the day- with the other option of chickening out and just using paint also available to me!

On the day I went for a side view of the hall.

I liked the variety of colours from the gardens in this scene and the fact I could get a piece of the hall in without it being the main focal point.

I also liked the semi-circular shape of the gardens at the front leading the viewers eye into the scene.

I started by making a very rough compositional sketch in conte crayon before adding an under painting in acrylic paints to block out the main shapes and colours.

I then set about building up the image with soft pastels, pencil pastels and conte crayons.

And after adding some more marks and colours to add interest and details I was finished!

The piece took me around 4 hours to complete. It had just started to rain and I was very cold at that point so I decided it was time to finish and down tools!

This work and the work of all the artists who took part, is available to view and purchase at the picture house gallery in Padiham for two weeks.

Well done to all who took part in the competition and to the competition winners!