My new favorite medium is pastels. (Shown to the left is my latest that I did of my dad for my mom for Mothers Day.)
All mediums have their strengths and weakness' and lately I've been on a venture to try mediums I haven't used in years. I've been revisiting watercolors, trying gouache and tinted charcoals and now pastels.
I was never a fan of pastels. I think the reason is when I was younger I used charcoal for portraits and would blend with my fingers. I tried that with pastels and could never get the look I wanted. I realize my problem was just using one flesh tone. Recently I tried a portrait with the tinted charcoal and realized that they just blend themselves if you start with a base fleshy color and layer it with other colors as you go along. It works beautifully! So having had fun with the charcoals I decided to go with pastels since they have more of a color range.
I like the fact that it is so easy to keep the color shades the same. With acrylics the paint dried too fast and when remixed it may not be exactly the right color. Pastels eliminate this problem. I usually start with a burnt orange and layer it with pencils in the reddish yellow family and add white and light colors for highlights. I rarely use my finger to blend anything.
The only down side is that they smudge. Not as bad as I thought they would but it is a problem. I do spray them with workable fixative just to hinder the smudging a bit.
Well now that I may have bored you with my explanations I will show you my progress.
This was done with tinted charcoal and I realized blending right on the paper with the various fleshy colors works pretty darn well!
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| Tinted charcoal |
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| Tinted charcoal |
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| Pastel. As soon as I returned from the art store with my new pastel pencils I drew this. |
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| Pastel |
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| Pastel |
Pardon the way this post is. As much as I feel I am computer literate and like google I have trouble with this blogger. I can never seem to get stuff where I want it to go. The picture of my dad is up top because when I removed the caption that wouldn't center it decided to put him up there instead of down here. I have no idea why. arrrrgggghhhh
Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your day!
