How to Begin with Pastels By Learning Technique

If you want to know how to begin with pastels there are a few techniques that need to be explained first. Once you understand and practice them and see what effect they will have it will be very easy to begin painting with pastels.

Spare a thought for the oil painters of the world. Doing an oil painting is a messy, complicated and time-consuming process. Each layer needs time to day before the next layer can be added, everything needs to be cleaned with turpentine when you finish a session, and the finished article needs up to a year to completely dry! It's definitely a labor of love.

In contrast, pastels are ridiculously simple, quick and...ok, they're not exactly clean, but at least you can tidy up afterwards with a vacuum cleaner and soap rather than smelly, flammable turpentine!

It's considerations like this that make pastels a great choice for those of us who don't have a lot of time to devote to our artwork. If you have enough space in your home to allow you to leave your materials out, then you can easily sit down for five or ten minutes at a time, get some pigment down, then get up and walk away. There's nothing that will dry out or spoil, so you can keep doing this until your masterpiece is complete.

When you're sitting down for one of your short sessions, use these five techniques to help you work quickly and effectively.

1. Sketch out your design using artists' charcoal, hard pastels, or pastel pencils. Get your composition (i.e. the elements in your artwork and the distances and relationships between them) the way you want it before you continue.

2. Color big areas quickly by sweeping the side of your pastel stick across your surface. Vary your pressure for different effects. Once you've blocked in your big areas of color, you can focus on detail work and on techniques such as those below.

3. Blend, smooth and smear colors using a paper stump (this is soft paper tightly rolled so that it has a point). These techniques have many uses, from creating color and tone variations by combining two different colors, to softening the transition between two adjacent areas of color, removing the visible line strokes from an area of cross-hatching, blending your shading for a smooth transition from light to dark, and more.

4. Use scumbling to produce interesting effects. Scumbling is lightly dragging the side of a differently-colored pastel stick over an area of color that you've already laid down, in such a way that the underlying color shows through. This produces a kind of ‘broken color' that works for representing things like haze in the atmosphere, the texture of fabric, fog, shafts of light, or distant elements in a landscape. It's a little unpredictable, so experiment with it and see what works for you.

5. Represent elements such as skin tones by layering several different colors, one on top of the other, in a way that allows some of the preceding layers to show through. Layer from dark to light, and use a little fixative to restore tooth to your surface if it stops accepting more pigment.

Now that you know how to begin with pastels you've only one thing left to do - start painting with pastels! Enjoy.

Emma Ralph is an experienced pastel artist. To learn more about how to begin with pastels visit www.paintingwithpastels.com