I did this work from life, using a sheet of Colourfix Original paper in Dark Green Leaf shade. I did not do any underpainting, and was using Richeson Hand-rolled and some of my new Mount Vision pastels. The Richeson pastels, to my mind, really work well on this paper, especially if I don’t do an underpainting in NuPastel.
I decided to skip including the mountains around Lake Louise, and focus in on the poppies. The result is that what is actually the lake looks like sky. But maybe that’s okay. This study was done on Colourfix Smooth in Blue Haze.
I had no idea what to paint today, so I just started randomly putting NuPastel on paper, and then I rubbed it in with a paper towel. Now I had an underpainting (of sorts) but didn’t know what to do with it — at first. Then I realized it reminded me of autumn trees.
My trees are cartoonish, but the whole picture is straight from my imagination, based on the colors and shapes of the random “underpainting”.
Yesterday’s sunset looked a bit like a fried egg, didn’t it? So I tried it one more time. This time I used Art Spectrum Colourfix paper, in the Terracotta shade.
While this painting is hardly a masterpiece, I feel most satisfied with it, and I finally got the reflection looking a bit more realistic than on my previous tries.
Today I did another study of the reedy lake (again on Canson Mi-Teintes Red Earth colored paper). I used a different pastel palette than I did before, and I did not do any underpainting.
This time, I think I did a better job of painting the sun’s reflection on the water.
Most of the pastels used were Richeson hand-rolled pastels, which seems to work for me on the Mi-Teintes paper, although it’s clear you can see a lot of the paper’s color coming through.
My mom just had her birthday, and I’m trying not to eat a lot of sweets now that it’s after the holiday season. So, the next best thing — to draw the sweets! Here’s a slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
I used the online color picker “Color Picker Online” to check the palette for the cake — it’s not just a straight yellow.
For the cake itself, there are multiple shades of yellow, as well as purples, oranges, and browns. For the frosting, I used multiple shades of brown and dark orange. I did the work on Canson Mi-Teintes (smooth side) in Honeysuckle.
Not at all! Not according to Maggie Price, in her 2007 book Painting with Pastels: Easy Techniques to Master the Medium.
She says there is no requirement to use an underpainting, and then gives examples of when you might not want to. One is for when you’re using unsanded papers such as Canson Mi-Teintes, simply because those kinds of papers cannot hold many layers of pastel. Every layer will go towards filling the minimal tooth — plus Canson has so many different colors you can select a color to serve as your “underpainting”.
Price goes on to make the same point with regard to Art Spectrum’s Colourfix sanded paper — that brand, too, has many different shades available for purchase, and presumably, if you’re using a specific shade, you’ve selected that shade for the way it will work with what you will paint on it.
This is good to know, as right now, my main paper stash is made of Mi-Teintes, and Colourfix!
Reference: Maggie Price, Painting with Pastels: Easy Techniques to Master the Medium (Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light Books, 2007), p. 71.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 