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Three Great Pastel Painting Techniques

Soft pastels are popular because they combine bright colors with being an easy medium to work with. You could be walking past the studio area in your home, decide on a whim that you can afford to devote five minutes to a work-in-progress, and be adding to it literally seconds later. However, this ease doesn’t mean that working with pastels is free of technique – far from it. Here are three of the best.

1) Start with a drawing phase.

The ease with which you can add pastel pigment to your art paper actually means that more time should be devoted to planning and sketching than for other mediums. Otherwise you might find that you inadvertently wreck your artwork due to over-enthusiasm.

Artist Willow Charcoal is one of the best sketching tools for pastel artists, as it blends well with pastels and you can easily manipulate it on the surface or wipe it off using just your hand. Use it to sketch out your design, using a reference photo if you have one.

Once you’ve sketched out your design and you have the composition you want, you want to mark where the accents are – i.e. the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows. Use a white soft pastel for the highlights, and you can use either a dark soft pastel or just go on using the charcoal for the shadows. This step forces you to consider the number and position of your light sources, which is essential.

When you finish this sketching phase you should have a really good idea of where the artwork is going, even though there’s barely any color on the paper yet. With that done, you can work more freely on adding color.

2) Vary your pressure to create different effects.

How hard you press your pastel sticks against the paper is one of the big variables when working with pastels. Press harder and you’ll get a deeper, richer color. Back off the pressure and you can make delicate lines and shading effects.

Scumbling is the technique of using the side of a pastel stick and dragging it with light pressure across an area of a different color that you’ve already put down on your paper. This creates a sort of ‘broken color’ effect that works really well to represent clouds, fog, or distant elements of a landscape.

Light pressure is also used for hatching, which is laying down a series of lines close together. It’s great for shading.

Heavier pressure is used for laying down bold areas of color or shadow on your surface. You can put down layers on top of one another and then use a graffito technique (i.e. scratching or scraping through the top layer of pigment) to reveal the bottom layer through the top one.

3) Rubbing is your friend.

Rubbing is probably the most-used technique in pastels. Rubbing the pigment with a tool (like a paper stump) or with a finger or hand after it has been put down on the surface can have many effects. It can soften and blur the pigment (which otherwise can look quite ‘defined’ due to the tooth of the surface), or to blend adjacent areas of color, or to create gradations, or all of those at the same time! Because pastel colors can’t be mixed on a palette, they can only be mixed on the surface, and so rubbing and blending them together is also a way of creating new colors. Experiment with rubbing, and you’ll quickly find how useful it is.

Trying out different methods of pastel techniques can make all the difference in the world to your paintings.

Emma Ralph is an experienced pastel artist. To discover other pastel painting techniques visit www.paintingwithpastels.com

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Watercolor Painting Techniques Brush Control


In this article, I’m going to share some techniques for brush control.

Some would say that this is probably the most important part of

watercolor painting. Without proper brush control, depending on what

it is you’re trying to accomplish, you’re not going to reach your

intended destination…whatever that may be. So hopefully, this article

will help you get there.

While it’s not possible to go over every brush control technique, I

will cover a few of the main ones. The first technique is called bands

of color. It’s actually very simple. What you do is choose a color and

draw some kind of a line with it, preferably curved. Then, you take

another color and, right underneath the first line, try to draw an

identical line in shape with the second color. You then repeat this

with a third, fourth and so on. The resulting image is going to be

quite interesting if done right. The key is leaving just enough space

between each line so that the colors don’t wash together.

Another really cool technique is thick and thin. This is where you start

out painting a line so that it begins thick but then begins to thin

before going back to thick again and so on until you’ve completed the

entire length of the line. This is accomplished by simply applying lots

of pressure at the start to create the thick part of the line and then

easing up to create the thin part. It’s a very effective technique.

Then of course there is the wrist flick technique. This is really good

for painting things like grass. The technique does take a little

practice but once you master it, it’s so cool. Say you want to paint a

grass blade. What you do is start at the bottom of the canvas, where the

grass would start (as if it were growing out of the ground) and then

flick the brush upward. With a little practice, this will actually begin

to look like a real blade of grass. That is of course assuming you’re

using the correct watercolor.

These brush control techniques only scratch the surface but should get

you started on your way to creating some nice designs. If you want a

complete watercolor tutorial, check out the link in my signature. You’ll

learn everything you need to know about watercolor painting.

Yes! We have lots more information on watercolor painting lessons, how to watercolor paint and watercolor techniques… just visit our site, http://watercolorpainting.resourcegalore.com