Basic Paint Application: Painting with Pastels

Exercise: Painting with pastels

I spent quite a lot of time working with pastels in Drawing 1. Here are a few of examples of my previous work:

Soft Pastels:

Soft pastels on a sandpaper ground

Soft pastels have been crushed and applied with a
paintbrush to ad a hint of colour to a pen and ink drawing

Soft pastels on a dark ground (Ingres paper)

Oil Pastels:

Oil pastels on a dark green ground

Oil pastels and oil bars on a pale grey ground

There were a couple of other ways of using the pastels that I had not yet tried apart from in small sections in my sketchbook (for example combining pastels with paint and using oil pastels with solvent) so I decided to make a couple more drawings.

Oil pastel on prepared acrylic paper

We have had a large crop of pomegranates in the garden this year so I decided that these would make a suitable subject for my first sketch. This is a very rough sketch simply as a vehicle for using some different techniques without trying to be accurate with the drawing. I scraped off bits of the oil pastels and oil bars with a palette knife and smeared and script it  about on the paper . I also used some turps on a brush to spread the colour about.

Soft pastel and gouache on black paper

The very rapid sketch above used blended and smeared soft pastel in combination with gouache. It is abstract but was inspired by a view of Naples from an aeroplane when coming in to land.