Susan Klinger

...eventually I wanted the flowers to prevail, but with subtle evidence of the stripes remaining. In retrospect, it is a metaphor for me...

A step by step demonstration of how I draw an ocean wave, capturing the color, transparency, motion and wetness using pastel.

Painting my sky series had the potential to become repetitive, to the point of boring for me as an artist. Could I continue to stay inspire

Use all that pigment dust to make new pastels!

It was early in my art teaching career. I was enjoying a local art/craft show on the weekend. I wandered into an artist’s booth, a ceramic artist if I remember correctly. We struck up a conversation and I learned she had also been an art teacher who had retired early. I forget how the conversation developed, but at one point she asked me if I had ever heard the phrase about art teachers. I suppose I looked confused. She went on to tell me that art teachers are commonly s

I was interviewed recently for an article and one of the questions I was asked was, how did I make the transition from watercolor to pastel? To provide some background, I began my pursuit of being a professional artist by painting in watercolor. My road to painting in watercolor is an entirely different story, so for now let’s just acknowledge the fact that I was a watercolor artist for many years. As part of my graduate level studies required for my job as a high school art

In my most recent blog post, I described the start of a month-long series of sky studies. My intent was to do one pastel study per day with a goal of completing 24 over a period of one month. At that writing I was about halfway to my goal. (If you missed the preceding post and want to read it first, you may do so here, just don’t forget to come back and finish reading!) Mission accomplished! I have completed 24 miniature studies of skies that I have photographed over many ye

There are many artists out there that have taken on a 'painting-a-day' challenge. ...this concept seemed more like torture that ben

It’s funny how motivation can strike, run hot, and then…it’s gone. This happens more times than I like to admit when it comes to my painting. I see a specific scene. I may take a photo. Or I may get the idea for a concept – perhaps an idea for a series of works with no particular image in mind. The idea may roll around in my head for a while. At some point, I begin to get a strong urge that this is what I need to be working on next. I do some preliminary sketches to flesh

I read an article recently about the importance of stories. It made me wonder if it was important to share the stories of my paintings with my viewers. So, for this week's blog I am sharing the story of my Deep Blue series of paintings. The series was spawned by a trip to the Abacos in the Bahamas. It was a vacation I had eagerly anticipated – my first time to anything Bahamas - and the week flew by. The entire trip, I was awestruck by the colors, especially of the water. As

Purple. Violet. By whatever name, it has always been a favorite color for me. As a child, I begged for a purple bedroom. I have my fair share of purple, lavender and lilac in my wardrobe. More importantly, it is a color that is vital in my palette of colors, regardless of the actual color of the subject I am painting. If you think back to your elementary art classes in school, you learned that purple could be made by mixing red and blue. Pretty much any combination of red

Just as in music, all the 'notes' must come together for a successful painting. Follow along in the evolution of a pastel painting f

Hopefully that title has you just a bit curious! As some of you might know, I spent 34 years teaching art to very talented high school art students. If any of them are reading this, they would be able to easily explain to you the YUK stage, most likely while rolling their eyes! It is something I discovered in creating my own art, but it wasn’t until my students encountered it, that I coined the phrase, the “YUK stage” in searching for a way to explain the phenomenon and to

Palm Trees. I never tire of them. There are so many different varieties. Tall & thin. Short and stocky. With coconuts. Without coconuts. I especially love to stand directly underneath and photograph up into the canopy. Although I just returned from a trip to Florida, it was not my intention to write about palm trees. But this week proved to be all about the trees that I find so intriguing. I have previously painted a series of pastel paintings, two of which were coconut

This is a question that gets asked frequently of pastel artists. Pastel is a dry medium, just like charcoal or pencil (more commonly referred to as 'graphite' in the art world!), so one might think of pastel as drawing. Yet many pastel artists, including me, work with their chosen medium in a very painterly way. In an exhibit that features only pastels, this question is irrelevant. But what about all-media art shows where the work must be grouped into categories for judgi

My primary painting medium is pastel. The term ‘pastel’ is unknown to some and just plain causes confusion for others. This is not due to ignorance, but due to the way the term has been used to mean very different things. First, I am not referring to the word ‘pastel’ being used to reference the pale colors of a baby’s room or the outfit you wear at Easter. That is an adjective and has absolutely no correlation to the art medium that I use to create my paintings. If you ar