You’re staring at a fresh sheet of paper, pastel stick in hand, wondering if you’re about to make something beautiful—or something that looks like it crawled out of a preschool art bin. That weird mix of hope and hesitation is exactly where the fun begins. Read more!
Soft pastels are oddly forgiving. You mess up? Smudge it. Blend it. Layer over it. Unlike pens or paint, there’s always a way to fix—or fake—your way to something that works. And when you’re in a class like the ones offered at The Tingology, that blank page becomes a lot less intimidating.
These courses don’t throw you into the deep end. You start with shapes. Blobs, even. Then a little shading turns that blob into fruit. Or a moon. Maybe both. The instructors know when to step in with a quick nudge and when to let you stumble into something cool on your own. There’s no art-school pressure here. It’s more “here’s a trick that works” than “let’s talk about the philosophy of color theory.”
The stuff you need? Already waiting for you. No list of art store errands. You sit down and the materials are there—solid pastels, toothy paper, tissues for blending. You’ll get a little dusty. Maybe your sleeves end up streaked with blue. But nobody’s frowning about that. That’s kind of the point.
The people around you matter just as much as the supplies. There’s usually a mix: someone retired and finally doing what they always wanted, someone burned out from work needing a reset, someone tagging along with a friend and pretending they can’t draw. And every time, that room ends up buzzing with chuckles, questions, encouragement, and the occasional gasp of “Wait, YOU made that?”
Mistakes? Plenty. But also a lot of small wins. You learn that adding a tiny white dot makes your still life pop. You find out your messy shading actually looks deliberate. And that first moment you create something that makes someone else go “ooh”? That’s gold.
Your work doesn’t stay locked in a classroom, either. You start noticing it—propped on a shelf, pinned to a fridge, slid into a frame. And maybe more surprising: you start calling yourself creative again. Not because someone told you, but because you’ve got chalk on your hands and color on your paper that wasn’t there yesterday.