Pastel Painting Tips

Pastel Painting Class

more on PASTELS

Use A Magazine to Transport Drawings

If you've got a bunch of small charcoal or pastel drawings that you need to get home, put them inside a glossy magazine, using the pages of the magazine as separators.

Lifting Out Small Details in Pastel or Fixing Errors Without an Eraser

A craft or hobby knife works well for small details or erasing or making white marks (or lighter ones) with pastel -- you use it to scrape off the pastel on your painting. It also can be used for making a glare on eyes and animals' eyes I found these Pastel Painting suggestions on the net very helpful.

Assembling a set of pastels

The first step in putting together your own set of pastel colors is to select one of each of the following: warm red, cold red, orange, cold yellow, warm green, cold green, cold blue, warm blue, cold violet, and warm violet. But faced with so many options, how do you choose?

Well, pastels come in a range of tints. The majority of pastel manufacturers produce a basic tint and then a range of lighter and darker tints of this. These can be identified by the pastel's code number. Start by selecting the second or third darkest of any tint, in the colors listed above. This will provide you with a set of 10 mid-tone pastels. Your initial 10 pastels will provide you with a set of mid tones (warm red, cold red, orange, cold yellow, warm green, cold green, cold blue, warm blue, cold violet, and warm violet). Remember, you want a selection which is relatively harmonious and representative of the subjects you will paint.

It is best if you make the choice yourself, but if you're unsure, here are my suggestions:

* Warm red: scarlet lake, permanent red, or poppy red * Cold red: carmine, alizarin crimson, or madder lake * Orange: mid orange or permanent orange * Cold yellow: lemon yellow * Warm green: permanent green or phthalo green * Cold green: blue green or turquoise (especially if intending to do seascapes) * Cold blue: cerulean blue * Warm blue: French ultramarine or ultramarine deep * Cold violet: ultramarine violet or blue violet * Warm violet: red violet or quinacrindone violet"

It's interesting to use pastels in some ways because you can't blend them, you have to use a big variety of color. But pastels come in hard, medium and soft. You can combine and layer it to get the color you want."

Painting outdoors - Consider these points

1. Light changes significantly every few minutes

.2. Working on small surfaces reduces the amount of time spent covering the surface and therefore helps in quickly capturing the light and shadows.

3. There isn't time to waste or agonize over decisions.

4. If the center of interest is a particular light effect, it is important to memorize it, as it will be gone in a moment.

5. ‘Sky holes' in trees are darker than the sky below them.

6. The tops of trees are affected by ‘sky shine.'

7. Atmospheric perspective makes objects appear lighter, cooler, and less detailed with distance.

8. Objects in fog will still have edges.

9. Trees, like people, are identifiable by silhouette and structural anatomy.

10. Green comes in great variety, and the sky is not always blue.

11. The direction of light needs to be consistent in a painting. 1

2. Shadows and reflections on water are not the same thing.

13. Dark objects will appear lighter in reflections and light objects will appear darker in reflections.

14. Waves have structure, and their light/colors are different depending on the weather.

15. Relative value is the structure of a painting.

16. Relative color temperature and chroma are secondary to the composition of a picture.

Using Photos

"Photographic references are useful tools, but it is important to know how and when to use them," she explained. "It is not possible to learn to draw by copying photographs. One becomes an artist and trains the eye and hand by working from life. After mastering the skills of seeing values and colors and creating expressive marks and strokes, the artist knows how to deal with the distortions of photographs and how to create a work of art-a different genre altogether from photography. Premature reliance on photographs is the kiss of death to artistic training. There are no shortcuts."

Oil painting

This process can easily be mimicked in pastel-which shares so many similarities with oil-by beginning with harder pastel sticks in the initial block-in stage and progressively working towards the softer brands for the final layers. The other means of retaining control in oil paint is to allow each layer to dry before applying additional layers. Pastel artists may employ a similar method by applying layers of fixative to settle and solidify the pastel before applying additional pigment. If you prefer softer pastels and wish to work in layers, the initial pastel application can be rubbed or scraped down-another technique employed by our oil painter friends-to allow for subsequent layering. Depending on the support, this can be an effective means of producing bold painterly pastel paintings that have as much substance and visual weight as an oil painting.

Two tips that might prove helpful. First, select harder sticks for the darker regions of the palette, Typically our first strokes are in the darker, dull shadow areas of the painting. Having more of these darker, harder sticks in our palette makes it easier to utilize the softer, brighter, lighter sticks as the painting progresses. The second tip is to take one section of your palette box and segregate a selection of harder pastels, in a variety of hues, values, and intensities. If you have a heavy hand when pastel painting, work hard to soft

vote up vote downshare print flag

Was this Hub ...?