ARTIST’S HINTS AND TIPS

FOR PASTELLERS

• There are several choices of paper in a variety of colours, so choose a colour to enhance your work.

Tex and Canson are my choices.

• Make a road map in Orange or Red Conte before starting your pastel work.

• Dark areas can be under painted with black drawing ink if working on Tex paper; this will make your pastels “sing’.

• Don’t be too heavy handed with your pastels, try to just caress your paper, if you have too much pastel on the paper brush it off with a bristle paint brush.

• Pastel can be used in many ways, either on the side after removing the paper cover or as a drawing tool; there is no right or wrong way.

• Pastel is good to recover a failed watercolour painting.

• Start with your mid tones, and then go lighter or darker.

• Use your hard pastels first, soft pastels will sit on top, it won’t work the other way round. Schminke pastels are very soft and more expensive, but they are brilliant for doing the final touches, especially the white if doing a seascape and capping the waves.

• You can use a fixative to prevent smudging, or even spray to keep layers on your work, this will dull your colours off, and it takes away the “bloom”.

• The alternative is to roll your work, cover with a piece of butcher’s paper and roll with a rolling pin, a flat sided bottle or a hard rubber roller. Be careful to hold the paper down whilst rolling, otherwise it can smudge.

• Colourfix can be purchased in liquid form and applied to paper, cardboard etcetera, or even a failed watercolour; this puts a “tooth” on for great pastelling. It comes in a variety of colours or clear, inks can be added to create your own colour or add acrylic paint for a personalised tint.

• If you like to blend your pastels, try wearing a rubber or latex glove, as this keeps your fingers clean and gives a nice smooth blend.

• For small blending areas use a cotton bud.

• Make your own pastels. When you find you have lots of pastel dust, particularly in the same colour, mix it with tiny amounts of water and roll into a shape like a pastel stick; allow to dry on a tissue or paper towel. This method is useful if you find you have lots of little bits that you can no longer handle

or if horror of all horrors you drop your pastels and have lots of bits, I have seen this happen regularly. Buy a mortar and pestle to crush up bits of pastel to make a fine powder, don’t put too much water in the mix, and use an eye dropper, as you can’t take it out again.

Try to make the stick relatively thin, this dries much quicker.

• Pastel pencils are useful; sharpening can be easily done by attaching a piece of coarse sandpaper to a piece of MDF board or similar, removing the excess wood outer and carefully sanding the pastel inner on the sandpaper. Often trying to sharpen the pencil results in the pastel breaking before a reasonable point can be obtained.

• Make sure you include a colour from your background in your foreground.