practicing my pastels

Today during Open Studio hours I decided to do some practice paintings using oil pastels and soft pastels. Pastels used to be my main medium of choice years ago when I was first starting out. I don't have any formal painting training, I taught myself to paint by reading art books & trying things out. Pastels were an easy way for me to move from drawing to painting. And then eventually I moved on to use oil bars (oil paint in a stick form) so that I could paint on canvas without using brushes and create paintings on a much larger scale. But once in awhile I get the pastels back out and give it a go again. And this time I'm doing so to prepare for a workshop I'll be teaching on Saturday November 7th in the VineArts Studio. I'm going to teach some basic techniques with oil pastels and soft pastels. I use techniques that entail layering color and I will also blend with my fingers. My style is very impressionistic and I love to paint landscapes. This is an oil pastel of a landscape in France (I used a photo from a book as a reference). I exclusively use Sennelier & Holbein artist quality oil pastels.
This is a soft pastel of the same photo reference in France. I exclusively use Winsor & Newton artist quality soft pastels.