Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Pastel #12


A different paper! This is done on Colorfix sanded paper with Rembrandt pastels. I had tried the sanded paper once before with just marks on a half-sheet and made a horrible mess. So far I have used Canson Mi-Teintes or similar pastel papers, but I needed something that would hold more pastels.

As a beginner, a lot of my problems with pastels are simply lack of experience. I have seen many beautiful paintings done on the Canson paper, so I cannot blame the paper. Cannot blame the pastels either. It's me!

I pulled out the other half-sheet of the Colorfix sanded paper yesterday, made some pastel marks on it, and suddenly everything went well. I even tried some watercolor on the paper and added pastels over the watercolor after it dried. Nice. Time to try an actual painting.

This scene has been done before, but it was easy to choose for my sanded paper experiment. I went so far as to use watercolor for the first layer. It was very pretty and rich in color, but it made it difficult to determine where and how much pastel was used. I'm not ready for a watercolor background.

The pastels were so easy to apply this time around. Only Rembrandts were used because they were doing great on the sanded paper, and I did not plan to take this farther than getting used to the sanded paper. The Rembrandts work so much better than on regular paper. I'll add the softies on top next time.

This one is 9"x12". As usual, the colors are a little off. I fool around with the color adjustments, but I get bored with learning how to do them and give up. The best I can do is to pick a white point, usually with the aid of a value card to the side in the photo, and leave it at that.

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