Often you see pastel paintings in exhibitions and wonder how the artist managed to arrive at the finished product?
PENCIL – When you go to a shop to choose pastels they often seem quite gaudy colours or very dull, so I think people are often unsure which to choose.
As a contemporary artist I would say you are better not to choose to many colours to start with. Nowadays you can choose ready selected boxes to suit a certain type of subject. It rarely happens that you want to use all the colours in the box.
Usually you are better to choose just a few colours that you know you will use. As an example – initial colours for say landscapes, a nice variety of different greens, but some neutral colours maybe to blend in or to highlight various areas.
PALETTES – You are the artist so you need to choose wisely, but generally, I personally would include the following: Cadium Yellow, French Ultramarine, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Olive Green, Crimson Lake, White, Lamp Black and perhaps another shade of yellow and red. There are also different variations of pastels, so this has to be taken into the equation.
OIL – These do not crumble, but you cannot mix them with other pastels. On the other hand they are good because they do not smudge easily, great for fine work, because they do not crumble.
SOFT – These are crumbly, colourful, they smudge, are great to blend with and will cover quite large spaces.
HARD – Easy to erase, not so crumbly and good for first sketches.
I am a contemporary painter and would advice you that it is better to pay a tiny bit more for your paints if you want your work to last well. The pigments are generally better and therefore less likely to fade. If you wish to keep your pastels clean keep them in a box. Ensure you cover the box inside with ground rice. The roughness of the rice rubs against the pastels, it cleans any filth they may have picked up which they often get from rubbing against each other.
Clearly you need to wipe them over before you use them.
Usually many people just keep them in a box lined with corrugated paper or in improvised supermarket package trays. It is often better to work with your painting on a tilt as then, specks of the pastels that crumble will fall away.
Finally it is better to have your paper fixed to a board wider than the paper you are using.
All in all take time to choose the paper you use and most important of all – enjoy your art!…
Pastels are probably a good medium to begin painting with and everyone has to start somewhere. They are easily accessible to the general public to buy, whether in the stores, art shops or probably a local stationers. They vary in price considerably, but some sell on the market quite cheaply.
So there is something within the range of all pockets. Adults and children alike love experimenting with them, they take up little space so they are so easy to carry on your person combined with a small sketchbook.
This article was written by Anna Meenaghan of http://annameenaghanart.com
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