Finding Your Voice in Pastel Landscapes:
Where Country Roads Lead to Personal Expression along the way, and choosing the road less traveled.
By Alain J. Picard
As artists, we’re all walking our own country roads—meandering paths toward unknown destinations, embracing beauty along the way, and choosing the road less traveled.
Blue Country View, 6×12” pastel on UART400
There’s something magical that happens when you stand before a landscape with pastels in hand. Maybe it’s the rolling hills of wine country, a weathered fence line cutting through golden fields, or a simple dirt road disappearing into morning mist. The scene calls to you, but here’s the beautiful truth: what you create doesn’t have to match what your eye observes.
Your art is your story. And landscape painting in pastels offers one of the most powerful ways to tell that story through color.
Color Your Story: The Heart of Personal Expression
When I work with artists exploring landscape painting, I remind them that color is deeply personal and poetic. It’s where you can express your unique point of view, filtering life through your own artistic lens. Think of it as having three essential dials at your disposal:
Hue answers “What color is it?” But here’s where it gets exciting—you get to decide. That green field could become golden ochre if that’s the story you want to tell.
Value asks “How light or dark?” These relationships create the bones of your composition, giving you permission to adjust colors according to your unique vision.
Intensity wonders “How brilliant or muted?” A foggy morning might call for soft, low-intensity colors, while a dramatic sunset demands high chromatic punch.
These aren’t rules to follow—they’re tools for storytelling.
Because the most important question to ask is, “How do I want to make the viewer feel?”
Want to transform a cool, green-dominant scene into something warmer and more inviting? Shift those hues toward gold while keeping your value relationships intact. The landscape takes on a distinct mood, and more importantly, it becomes your own.
On My Way, 10×10” pastel on UART500
Turn It Up: Finding Your Courage
Here’s where many landscape painters hold back, and I want to encourage you to push forward. Don’t be afraid to turn up the intensity in your work. When you shift away from literal local colors and play with chromatic intensity, magic happens in your painting—as long as your value shapes still make sense.
Try this: imagine placing four different pastels—orange, green-ochre, pink, and gold—all at the same value, side by side. Each hue is unique, but bound together by their common value, they create a resonant activity that brings your landscape alive. It’s like a symphony where each instrument plays its part, but together they create something more powerful than any single note.
The key is to squint often and keep your composition’s big shapes in mind. When value relationships hold strong, you have remarkable freedom to explore color in ways that move far beyond what the camera captures.
Gaining Momentum, 6×12” pastel on UART500
The Journey Matters
Country roads are perfect metaphors for our artistic journeys. They remind us that art-making is as much about exploration as the destination. Each painting is a chance to discover something new about how you see the world, how you respond to light and atmosphere, and what stories you want to tell through color and mood.
Whether you’re drawn to the purple shadows of evening light cutting across wheat fields, or the way morning fog softens a distant tree line into quiet whispers of color, your pastels can capture not just the scene, but the feeling of being there.
Let’s Journey Together
The road less traveled—the artist’s path—is one worth taking with intention and community. If this exploration of landscape painting through the lens of personal expression speaks to you, I’d love to invite you to join me for Landscape Week, an online event taking place September 8-12 where we’ll explore confident mark-making, expressive color and bold, dramatic landscapes together. Visit LandscapeWeek.com to learn more, registration opens on August 20!
It’s time to take that colorful journey into landscape painting. Let’s get lost inwonder along the way, and discover the unique stories only you can tell through pastel and pigment.
Coming Home, 9×12” pastel on UART400
Come Home to Your Own Unique Voice
There’s something profound that happens when you finally find your authentic voice as a painter. It’s like coming home to your own familiar landscape—that moment when you recognize the view not because you’ve painted it before, but because you’ve painted it as only you can. The colors speak your language, the mark-making feels like your personal handwriting, and the mood captures exactly what your heart saw when you first fell in love with the scene.
If we’re willing to be honest and brave, each country road we travel as artists can lead us back to ourselves—to that unique way we see light dancing across the water, or how we feel when autumn colors set the hills on fire. When you discover your voice in the landscape, you’re not just painting what you see; you’re painting who you are.
Ready to find your voice in the landscape? The road home awaits.
~ Alain
Learn more about Alain Picard’s painting instruction and how he can support your artistic journey at picardstudio.com