Today I watched a YouTube video (click here) by Karen Margulis about successful strategies for a daily painting habit. She demonstrated painting a landscape in pastel in 20 minutes and after I watched it once I decided to follow-along and try my hand at her style.
Below are step-by-step pictures of my attempt. I used a portion of my Canson Touch board in Twilight color. Karen’s painting is much superior to mine, but this was actually fun! It really did take 20 minutes. AND I feel ready to give a shot to doing a painting using one of my own photos.
The big tree really only looks like a tree from a distance, so I included a distant shot. I don’t yet have the skill Margulis has so I would want to draw out my trees a bit more. I can’t quite make the connection from abstract value shape to something I view as a tree after painting.
Gail Sibley has a video on YouTube wherein she uses white pastel paper, and a set of Terry Ludwig’s “Best Loved Basics” to paint a red-orange bowl with a fork balanced on it.
I decided to try my own hand at painting the red bowl. The paper I used was a gray-toned Canson Mi Teintes, and, since I don’t have Terry Ludwig pastels, I used a random set of 8 pastels (only 7 shown), making my best guess as to a close match to what Gail was using. I used vine charcoal to sketch the bowl on the pastel paper, and 2B charcoal pencil in the preliminary planning sketch.
I also created a grayscale version of the photo of the bowl, and the values are skewed. The background should not be darker than the cast shadow. Ditto for the shadow in the middle of the bowl, appearing like a gray stripe. It should not have been darker than the cast shadow.
I may tweak this painting tomorrow, if the paper can hold any more pastel.
Today I used some of my pieces of Canson Mi-Teintes paper, after reading some of Karen Margulis’ blog posts about loving the paper.
Since I’m still focused on pears and different mark-making styles, I decided to use stippling on a sheet of Terracotta tinted Mi-Teintes paper.
Then, after admiring the way Margulis makes her daisies, I attempted to copy her style (also on a piece of Mi-Teintes). I took Margulis’ advice to use a light touch, but I also did not do too much layering.
My experiment was largely to see which pastels work best on this paper. I noted the results at the bottom — Blue Earth and Richeson Hand-Rolled covered the paper much better than Unison or Blick Artists’ Soft Pastels. (Of course, that may also be the function of my skill level.)
I decided not to entirely give up on the Canson Touch paper — after all, I have 9 more 20×30 sheets of it! I need to learn how best to use it.!
After reading more blog posts by Karen Margulis, and the online workshop PDFs by Marla Baggetta, I decided to try using water on the pastel. I laid down some gray pastel, and then used an older watercolor brush to lightly wet down the pastel and mix it into the paper.
After letting it fully dry — which was at least 30 minutes — I painted the pear below. The dark brown cast shadow is from a Blue Earth pastel; the lighter brown is a NuPastel, the yellow and the orange are Richeson Hand-rolled pastels. I’m delighted with how the color laid down on the modified surface of the Canson Touch paper.
So, I ended up painting the rest of the pastel board with acrylic paint (Golden’s Fluid Acrylics in the yellow ochre color).
What was interesting is that the performance of the pastel sticks changed. Great America, NuPastel, Blick and Blue Earth skipped all over, and pigment was just falling off the painted paper! On the other hand, the Richeson Hand-Rolled and Sennelier seemed to grip the painted surface acceptably.
So, what have I learned?
I’ll use up my stash of Canson Touch and not buy any more
In the future, I’ll stick with neutral paper colors: either a light beige or a light gray, and skip colors like “Twilight” and Indigo. (Unless I paint a night scene.)
I’m happy with the way the Richeson Hand-rolled pastels performed on the Canson Touch paper, painted or unpainted.
I could use the Canson Touch with charcoal in the future.
I had no trouble with putting the acrylic paint to the Canson Touch paper.
Ugh. This did not turn out as I had wanted. Instead of learning how to make different marks with pastel sticks, I learned about which pastels work on which paper.
This paper was Canson Mi-Teintes Touch in Twilight. Sadly, I have 4 more boards of this stuff — and 5 boards (same size) in Indigo color. I regret buying the stuff and will never buy it again!
The pastels that don’t lay down color well on this paper are NuPastels, the Dick Blick Soft Artist’s sticks, Rembrandts, and Sennelier (at least from the 30 Landscape half-stick collection).
On the other hand, Richeson Hand-Rolled was not too bad! Neither was Blue Earth. The best of all, though, was Great American. (They’re having supply chain issues at the moment, sadly; else I’d buy some more sticks right now!) Willow charcoal is also great — perhaps I’ll do some charcoal work so as not to waste this paper.
Of course, the wildcard in all this is my beginner skill level. Could a pro lay down color better than I? It’s certainly possible. As it was, I was grinding the pastels into the “paper” and losing massive pigment in the process!
For pear #1, (top left) I stupidly did some blending with my finger of the background. Now it looks worse than before, plus the dust just rolled off. Fortunately, I’m working outside in the patio and have a jerry-rigged dust catcher at the bottom of the easel.
I’ve given up on doing 9 pears on this purple toned paper. What I plan to do for the last three pears is to wash the paper with fluid acrylic in yellow ochre — at least that’s somewhat of a pear color. I’ll let that dry, and try putting pastel on top of that to see what happens.
I spent some time today prepping for the first of two 9 pear studies (from Marla Baggetta’s “Making Your Mark” online workshop).
I’m using Canson Mi-Teintes Touch board in the Twilight color, and each pear study will be 8″ x 6″. I’m drawing the outlines in vine charcoal, and may make further adjustments as some of these pears look more like butternut squashes.
I also chose my palette, based on the “Urban Organic” palette from Sherwin-Williams HGTV back in 2012 (also the palette for the rooms in my house). It looked great as far as matching pastels — although I have nothing particularly close to the green blues — but when I put the pastels in their case, I realized there are too many that are too similar.
So I made adjustments, swapping out some of the creams and browns for magenta and purple. Looking forward to getting started tomorrow!
Today I put the finishing touches on my grayscale study of my cranberry glass. It’s no longer floating in space!
I was too busy today to do another sunset study, or some of the assignments from the online workshops I’m taking. However, I wanted to use some of my non-sanded pastel paper from the sampler I bought a year ago.
Today’s work is on Hahnemuhle Ingres paper, and I used only NuPastels.
What I like best is the candle flames. What I’m clearly struggling with is smoothly transitioning from one color to another! Part of that might be due to the hardness of the NuPastels; they don’t blend as well as soft pastels. The image is based on a very old birthday card.
Today’s painting is my own version of a “Desert Glow” sunset after I followed along in Assignment #1 of Marla Baggetta’s “Sunsets in Pastel” online workshop. (I’ve now signed up for 3 of her workshops — and then, with the Black Friday sales still on until this Friday, also signed up for a subscription to her monthly pastel workshops).
The first thing I did was to draw some thumbnails, using my Vincent Van Gogh brand of hard pastels, and vine charcoal. I decided to go with the vertical thumbnail on the bottom left as the reference for the sunset picture.
The next step was to proportionately size up the thumbnail sketch to the paper being used (Pastel Premier in Clay) and do the value sketch/underpainting. My thumbnail was, luckily, 2-1/2″ x 3-1/2″ so my picture was sized up to 7-1/2″ x 10-1/2″. I used Indigo Blue NuPastel for this part.
Next step was the fun part — choosing the colors!!
Gorgeous colors! These are almost all Great American, with some Blue Earth, a Terry Ludwig (light blue), and Mount Vision (darkest blue), and Dick Blick Artists’ Soft Pastels. The yellow is one of my Richeson Hand-Rolled yellows.
Here’s the completed study.
The first thing I have to say is that the photo — taken from my Samsung phone — does not sufficiently pick up the magenta, which is a bummer. It also picks up too much blue from the ground, which may (?) be due to the indigo blue underpainting (and of course the use of some darker blues in the ground area.)
Self-critiquing — I could go on and on. Marla Baggetta has a whole list of questions for us to ask ourselves, the first one being “Were you the director? Or did the piece direct you?” I got carried away laying down color, that’s for sure. It was a blast to use all those bright colors! I completely forgot about my thumbnail, and the idea of putting in a striated sky. And I got “lost” in the ground area, not having planned anything out (a structure like a house? Some telephone poles? Some greenery?) So the foreground is a poorly-thought-out mess.
What was good about this? I loved, loved, loved this paper texture! Totally fun to work with. AND I loved all the pastels I used.
For next time:
better planning for the foreground
More sky, less earth.
Underpainting — use the NuPastels again. but experiment with different colors.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 