Mary Aslin Two Day Plein Air Pastel Workshop
Nov 15-16 2025 9am - 4pm
Workshop fee $250
Please join Mary Aslin at the beautiful San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary for a 2 day plein air painting workshop using the medium of soft pastel. This workshop is suitable for all levels, beginners to advanced painters, with guidance individually tailored to your level at your easel. The workshop is open to SOCALPAPA Members. Limited to 15 participants.
Please join me at the beautiful San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary for a plein air painting workshop using the glorious, delicious, and seductive medium of soft pastel!
Soft pastel offers artists an opportunity to be expressive in many varied ways with immediate results: it requires no mixing, no drying, can be layered, and easily revised, with the resulting expressive mark a direct link from your heart to your hand on the painting surface. That direct link from heart to paint on a surface starts with an emotional response—consciously and subconsciously—to light quality: soft, etheral, diffuse and cool or warm, dramatic, and intense.
We will delve into understanding the nature of light more fully, where you will learn to capture color notes that sing with harmony and compose with value to design a rectangle of beautiful shapes.
Examples from master painters and short plein air pastel demonstrations will emphasize why this is so important and how to proceed with creating your own successful paintings. This workshop is suitable for all levels, beginners to advanced painters,
with guidance individually tailored to your level at your easel.
I will provide a basic materials list that works very well for painting outside but don’t worry if you don’t have everything. Some additional materials will be available, incduding a variety of soft pastels and some Uart sanded paper for you to supplement or experiment with. Although a full palette of pastels can look intimidating, a set of about 30 or 40 with pastel paper taped to a
board is all that you need to get started. And for those who already have pastels and surfaces but want more, I can suggest additions that might be helpful.
Table setups on the outdoor patio with views of foliage will be available for those without plein air easels.
Pastel can also be easily paired with fluid underpaintings in watercolor or acrylic and shares many of the techniques familiar to oil painters in its richness, opacity and “fat over lean” layering. If you prefer to work in oil, the side-by-side experience might inform your oil painting in a new way: those rich pastel sticks can make clean fresh marks, like making definitive brush strokes that are not overworked, and pastels offer saturated clean color that does not “sink in” or change, like using oil paint directly out of the tube unadulterated by solvent.
Plein air painting, offering a direct and immediate sensual experience of light and color, together, with the medium of pastel—also direct, immediate and sensual—results in an exhilarating creative synergy, one that lends itself perfectly to the joy of creating beautiful, personal and expressive art.
I look so forward to enjoying that synergy with you as we immerse ourselves in this gorgeous
reserve!
Register Here
Mary Aslin is an award winning artist and has been featured in many books and publications. She is a juried Artist Member of the California Art Club, a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, a Distinguished Pastelist with the Pastel Society of the West Coast, and a Master’s Circle Member of the International Association of Pastel Societies. Her paintings have been collected worldwide. Mary leads international workshops and she has been invited for the third time to exhibit in France, with the Association Culturelle Artistique, Saint Brisson sur Loire, in October and November 2025