Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

“McCoun Apple” (RWS)

The text and original art in this document are the property of Robert Stites; all rights reserved.
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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

Precautions:
Avoid using fixative indoors .
Fixative is a colorless varnish, much like hairspray, but with volatile solvents which should not be inhaled.

Avoid creating and dispersing pastel dust.

If pastels are applied too heavily, they load up the paper, causing the excess to fall off as dust. This is not a
problem ordinarily, but it could get to be if you work in a closed room without ventilation, or use paper not
intended for pastels.

Never blow on a picture to remove dust; hold it over a waste basket and tap the back. And of course, if you
know (or discover) that you’re allergic to pastel dust, you should not to take this course.

This is a Self Study Course

It is derived from lecture notes and illustrations prepared for an instructor-guided classroom course, but you
can take it here, without charge, at your own pace. There are many of advantages to this format, but one
disadvantage is that, without a class to go to, you’ll be tempted to put off the homework. Big mistake. Try to
complete one lesson a week.

View These Lessons on the Internet

The eight lessons in this course will be posted on the author’s blog http://pastelplace.blogspot.com/ In this
course, “hyperlinks”, like the one above, appear in blue; Windows users can move the cursor to the link, and
click when it changes to a hand (sometimes you have to hit the control key too—if so, Windows tell you). Mac
users can simply click the hyperlink.

Clicking a hyperlink takes you to the URL, without the trouble of entering all those characters.

Tip: the lessons are easier to read in full screen mode. Click “full screen” at the top of each lesson’s title page
to enter and leave full screen view.

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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

FAQs
Q1: What does the course cover?
The subjects, by lesson, are:

1. Introduction (Course Description, About Pastels, Color); Picture: “McCoun Apple”

2. Materials &Technique (Materials Uses, Painting Steps, Techniques); Picture: “Zinnias“

3. Buildings (Proportion and Perspective); Picture: “Kodak Monolith”

4. Interiors (Rooms, Furniture and Lighting); Picture: “A Corner of the Lounge”

5. A Still Life; Mementoes (Everyday Subjects; Composition); Picture: “Freshman Beanie”

6. Water (Moving and Still); Picture; Picture:“Mallard”

7. Landscapes (en pliene air); Picture: “Flying Home”

8. Conclusion (Sources, Exhibiting, Memory and Imagination, References); Picture: “Fantasy”.

Q2: “I’ve never done any drawing or painting. Will I have trouble keeping up?”
Not likely. The course is for beginners and you should enjoy it.

Q3: “What’s expected?”

You’ll be expected to buy the necessary materials, and practice for 1½ hours on each lesson

Q4: What materials do I need?

Note: The SKU’s and prices of selected items are taken from the Dick Blick catalog as of Feb. 6, 2011. This
information is for comparison only. It is not an endorsement, and shipping is not included.
 Set of 12 NuPastels (hard) 20034-1209 $9.38

 Set of 24 Faber-Castell Goldfaber half sticks (soft) 20000-1024 $8.95

 Three 19”x 25” sheets, pastel paper , Canson Mi Teintes, Steel Gray 10710-2661 $1.39 ea

 15” x 16” Masonite Drawing Board with clip, band 22945-1007 $6.99

 A can of Krylon Workable fixative 21703-1003 $4.99

 Masking tape, any size

 One each, black and white charcoal pencil, soft

 One each, kneaded and plastic erasers

 Baby wipes

 12 “or 18”ruler (rigid)

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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

 2 or 3 paper stumps

 Razor blade with safety cover

 Sand Paper block

About Materials
It’s enough to make you wonder—do the people who write
pastel books sell art supplies on the side? One tells us, “You
don’t need much to get started in pastels”, then rattles off a list
of more than $200 worth of equipment.

Another advises beginners to “...buy the best pastels you can

afford”, ignoring the law of diminishing returns (and making
you feel cheap if you don’t spend a lot). Schminke pastels, for
example, cost $4.60 a stick, while the half-sticks on your
materials list cost 37 cents each. Sure, the Schminkes are better,
but not 12 times better.
The other extreme is to use materials that incompatible or are
“Blue Dancers” , Edgar Degas,1898-99. Pastel on paper.
of such low quality they prevent you from doing good work.
The materials on the list are serviceable and compatible, but inexpensive. Depending on what you have
already, expect to spend about $40.

Pastel making at Daler Rowney
About Pastels
Pastel colors can be beautifully vivid and intense, as in Degas’s Blue
Dancers (above). Also see the courtroom pastels by Rebekah Boyer at
http://www.rebekahboyerart.com/courtroom_work.html (especially
“Woody and Mia ”).
Pastels have an immediacy that’s unknown to artists working in liquid
media, mainly because they have no drying time—one reason courtroom
artists are so partial to them.

Drawing or Painting?
There’s some confusion about this. The Musee d’Orsay in Paris is home to some fine pastels, but catalogues
them as “Graphic Arts”, along with drawings. The American Pastel Journal , however, regards pastels as
paintings. I find myself using both terms, and do so in this course. It doesn’t matter really, but the question
comes up.

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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

Pastels are made from the same pigments used in oil paints and watercolors. The powdered pigment is
formed into sticks held together by a “binder” usually gum tragacanth. A major difference is, the pastel artist
mixes colors on the paper, rather than on a palette. Another thing; though oil and watercolor artists do just fine
with a couple of dozen colors, the pastel artist typically uses many more.

It works like this. If a watercolor artist wants a value that’s a little lighter than what he has, he just adds water
to the pallet, allowing us to see more of the white paper. Oil paints are opaque, so the oil painter adds
white—also to a color on the palette. The pastel artist adds white too, but does his mixing on the paper. About
200 years ago, when it became apparent that the pastel artist could save time and get more consistent results
by using pastel sticks which were already mixed, pastel makers eagerly responded.

Example: Schminke soft pastels come in 80 different hues, each with five values: column B, (the darkest) has
black added; D (second column) is the unadulterated pigment, H has white added, M has more white, and O
is lightest of all with still more white. Five values of each of 80 hues comes to 400 sticks if you want a full set.
Each manufacturer has his own system, but all provide different values of each hue by combining a pure

An excerpt from the Schminke pastel color chart

pigment mixed with white or black

Color has three attributes: hue (what most people mean when they say color), value (lightness/darkness),
and saturation (aka chroma, intensity, brightness). Which column on the chart would you say is the most
saturated? Did you answer “column two”? The sample may be too small to tell that, but you could guess,
knowing that it’s unadulterated pigment.

Pastel Types
There are three kinds of pastel: soft, hard, and oil. Oil pastels are rather like children’s crayons in that their
pigment is bound with oil or wax, making them incompatible with the other kinds. That is just one reason we
don’t get into them. Please don’t try to use oil pastels in this course; they require techniques that are different
from those we describe.

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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

The only difference between hard and soft pastels is, the hard kind has more binder—the colorless gum
adhesive. “Hard” and “soft” are relative—so called hard pastels are softer than blackboard chalk. The best
soft pastels, have just enough binder to keep the sticks together, and use white kaolin clay instead of chalk for
the lighter values. “They come off the stick “like butter” some say. These are the traditional pastels, the kind
used by Degas, Cezanne, de la Tour, Delacroix, Toulouse- Lautrec, Cassatt, Picasso, Pissarro, Renoir, Manet,
Morisot, Vuillard, Whistler, and other masters.

Color
Color is a property of light, a narrow band in the electromagnetic energy spectrum which we can see. White
light is an equal combination of all the visible hues, as can be shown by passing it through a triangular glass
prism. The light comes out separated into every color of the rainbow. Why?

We have all noticed the way a fork in a glass of water appears to make
an abrupt jog at the water line. That’s refraction (bending) which occurs
when light passes through materials of different density; in this case
from air to water. Low frequencies, like red, diffract more than the higher
frequencies (violet bends least). When white light enters a prism, the colors diffract,
emerging as a spread from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet.

Color Perception
Most of the colors we see come from pigments, which work by
subtraction. A pigmented object absorbs (subtracts) some of the
frequencies striking it, and reflects the rest. We see only the
reflected part, and that is how we perceive color in everyday
things like flowers, paintings, cars, and the clover leaf at left.

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“Warm and Cool” Colors

Artists describe red and orange as “warm”, and blue and green as “cool”, probably because the flames of a
wood fire are red and orange, while large (and usually cold) bodies of water look blue or green. The terms are
subjective, the way a wine bibber describes “the scent of fresh cut grass” in a Chablis, or the “hints of
blackberry and cinnamon” in a Bordeaux. Even so, warm or cool colors can set the mood of a picture.

Be careful not to confuse so-called warm and cool colors with the “color temperature of light”, which tells us
the distribution of its frequencies. Incandescent light, for example, has a lower color temperature than
sunlight, meaning it has more red and less blue. Film manufacturers correct for this, so if you use indoor film
outdoors. your pictures come out looking blue.

Conundrum
So much for color theory, except to solve a riddle:
“If white light consists of all the visible colors, why is it, when I mix all my colors, I get something that looks like mud?”

The pigments in paints and pastels subtract a

part of the spectrum—so when you mix all your
colors, you subtract so much from so many hues
there’s little or no color left. This is more than an
intellectual curiosity; if you try to adjust a pastel
hue by blending more than two colors, you are
at risk of spoiling its luminous quality, and
making it muddy. Never blend more than two
colors if you can help it, three at most.

But subtraction is not the only way to make colors. Hues can also be added. To understand additive mixing,
imagine three spotlights with red, green, and blue filters. When the three beams are projected onto a white
screen, you get white. When only two colors combine by additive mixing, get ready for some surprises; as you
see in the above illustration, red and green combine to form yellow!

If you’d like to know more about color, see the tutorial by digital artist Jim Coe at http://www.art-head-
start.com/color-wheel.html Three of Jim’s visuals are used here, by permission.

Paper
Most pastel artists let some of the paper show through, so it helps to use a paper of a hue which will
harmonize (or at least not clash) with the subject. Neutral shades of gray are a safe choice.

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Pastels adhere by lodging in the spaces between paper fibers

and catching on irregularities milled onto the surface during
manufacture (like the pebbly side of Me Teintes paper). The
ability to catch and hold pastel is called “tooth”.

You can apply pastels to any surface that is not shiny, wet, or
greasy; newsprint for example—but newsprint doesn’t have
much tooth and loads up quickly, so it doesn’t make good
pastel paper even though you can make marks on it.

For maximum adhesion, some artists prefer paper with an

abrasive coating. One favorite of professionals is an abrasive
coated brand called “Wallace” at around $10 a sheet (for that
price it ought to be good ). Some artists prepare their own
surface using gesso (a kind of plaster) mixed with pumice (a
fine abrasive), and toned with acrylic colors. Others work on Copier paper, highly magnified

fine sandpaper. Then there is a furry looking “flocked”

surface, that produces soft pictures.

We’ll use Canson Mi Teintes [me ta(n)], which is

heavier than writing paper and is smooth on one side,
pebbly on the other. It is acid free, has fairly good tooth,
is reasonably priced, and comes in a 60 colors. Your
materials list calls for three large sheets in steel gray.
For most of the exercises in this course, you’ll cut the
sheet into quarters, 9¾x 12¾ inches.

SHORT BREAK
McCoun Apple photo

Assignment

Paint a McCoun Apple from the grocery store, or from the photo above.

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 Pastel Painting Lesson One; Introduction

Picture:
Using white hard pastel, draw a circle on the paper to
show where, and how big you want the apple.
Switch to soft pastel, and do the background, leaving a
hole for the apple. Instead of a carving board (as in the
photo, previous page), use a combination of brown,
overlaid with a light green, (both applied with side
strokes) and rub them into the paper with a finger. It’s
interesting, but not distracting.

Background of brown and green

Still using soft pastel, add the apple and highlights. Try
red orange along with red, to emphasize the strongly lit
surfaces.

The gray marks that run vertically all around the apple are
done by glazing, with white in this case, which is simply the
application of a layer so thin you can see through it.

Put the glazing off until everything else is done, and spray
the picture with fixative first; otherwise the white will pull
off the red which is already there, and instead of a white
glaze, you’ll get pink.

The challenge, with a simple subject like this, is it to make it

look three dimensional. To do that, I exaggerate the
shadow, flip the stem so I can give it a shadow, and shade
the dimple to make it look indented. Highlights help.

The picture is finished, except for two errors, noticed at this

point: there is a dark ring around the apple (caused by
uneven rubbing) and the background needs to be extended
to fill the voids in two corners.

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This is the finished pastel. All that remains is to sign it.

“McCoun Apple”

So...get your materials, and get started!

Revised Feb 6, 2011

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