Aaron Schuerr Demo and Red Rocks Paint Out

Last week I spent in the Red Rocks painting and having fun during my residency. I was excited to see that an amazing plein air pastel and oil painter Aaron Schuerr and his son are climbing also within the Red Rocks.

All the stars lined up and Aaron Schuerr kindly agreed to a demo for our group at Red Rock. Special thanks to our Las Vegas native member David Gilmore for his facilitation.

For the Demo, We met at Red Rock Overlook right on highway 159.

Aaron travels with his Art supplies in the suitcase.

He uses a Strada easel that I was kind of jealous of. He is left handed and his pallet was set up this way.

He uses a wide variety of pastels featuring his personal (as our other member Christine Debrosky) Jack Richeson Plein Air set. He highlighted Terry Ludwigs, Giraults as his favorites.

David Gilmore kindly shared his Red Rock Set from Terry Ludwigs and Aaron put them to work.

Aaron kept his composition simple. He skipped thumb nails sketches to preserve time but recommends to use them as very good composition exercise.

Of Course the Red Rocks were the main star of the painting.

The Scene

Aaron showed us how he uses scale to create an effect of reachable mountains.

He used mounted PastelMat (Aaron is mounting his own paper and cuts his own glass for the frames in his studio) as his surface and sketched out drawing with a hard pastel stick of local color and after he put main shades within.

He then carved out the mountains as we just watched the magic happen which created some magic of our own.