STEVE’S TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL PASTEL PAINTINGS

l Play to your strengths

The pastel medium offers the artist wonderful colour opportunities. Embrace them and use them to mesmerise your buyers – colour sells. In addition to colour, our coastal scenes can often present the artist with dramatic cloudscapes. l Architectural focal points Buildings in the landscape make strong graphic pointers and are very eye catching. For this reason they work well as focal points. You will see that, when viewing Storm Clouds over Waxham (page 31), the eye is drawn directly to the church, so this becomes the focal point of the composition. I have enhanced this by placing a patch of light sky behind the tower and by positioning the tower roughly a third up from the bottom and a third in from the left. In addition, the diagonal pastel marks point towards the tower, and the lights on the roof of the church and the cottages draw the eye in and make that part of the picture ‘pop’. Although fairly mute in colour, there is a full range of tone in this picture, from the black of the paper in the distant cliffs to the white in the sky. Notice also how the light patch of land in the foreground between the dunes and the cliff reflects the shape of the sky – all good compositional fun. l A means to an end

Never be afraid to use whatever materials or drawing aids are at your disposal. It is the end product, and what you have to say about the subject, that matters. There is good evidence that the Old Masters used optical and mechanical aids in the design of some of their paintings, so who am I to disagree. I am sure that, if mobile phone cameras had been available in their time, they would have used them also. l Blend early

If you do blend your pastel work, do it at a reasonably early stage in the painting. This will allow for the ‘main events’ to be added over the top and let the blended work sit back in the painting, rather like the backdrop in a theatre. l Whisper at the back, shout at the front

Keep background items simple, both in shape and tone. Failure to do this will cause conflict with the main items in the foreground and present the viewer with confused priorities. l On reflection

This is a tip that I picked up over the years from studying how Edward Wesson painted reflections. It is well known that, when painting reflections, the darks become a little lighter and the lights a little darker, resulting in less tonal contrast. Wesson followed this method with his work but, in addition, he also subtly changed the colour of the reflected object, resulting in a more interesting image. In Boats at Blakeney (page 31) you can see that the reflection of the left-hand boat has taken on a deep blue hue and I have made the reflection of the right-hand boat almost black. l Put a different slant on things

One of the most dynamic marks in painting is the diagonal. Used correctly, it can bring life and energy to your work – cover the smoke on the painting of Canal Life (right), and you will see how the whole picture becomes less interesting. The diagonal is one of my favourite tools in picture design – see if you can spot it in all the pictures in this article.