Experiments

Christmas ornaments: Follow-along with Marla Baggetta

| cathmary1030

I watched Marla Baggetta’s YouTube video from December 2019 in which she did a pastel painting of Christmas tree ornaments. I then attempted to copy her work to get a feel for how she laid colors for each ornament.

My copied work was done on Canson Mi-Teintes (the Red Earth shade) on the “honeycomb” textured side because I messed up the initial drawing on the smooth side. The initial drawing was done using vine charcoal, and then I used the sticks shown below for color. It looks best from far away!

Next up is trying a painting using some of my own ornaments.

More Studies: Using Canson Mi-Teintes

| cathmary1030

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.)

Using Water on Canson Touch

| cathmary1030

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.

I will be doing more experiments with this!

Pear Study

| cathmary1030

This study was done on Canson Mi-Tientes Touch paper, one from my Jackson’s Art sampler.

I like the contrast of the blue background with the orangey-yellow highlighted side of the pear. I don’t particularly care for the way the pastel doesn’t “fill in” the paper.

And since I did this study, I’ve learned that the pros often do underpainting for numerous reasons, one of which is coverage and a unified tone. I had thought that using toned paper in itself might be enough. It’s okay but it looks more like a drawing than a painting.