Pastels For Dummies E-Book

Sherry Stone Clifton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 497

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The latest tips and techniques for working with pastels - in full color

Pastels offer bright colors, a great level of portability, and no drying time - plus they're relatively inexpensive and can be used to draw and paint on almost any surface. Pastels For Dummies covers the many aspects of this exciting medium, from the fundamentals of choosing the right materials to step-by-step projects, including landscapes, abstracts, and portraits. Inside you'll find hands-on, easy-to-follow exercises and attractive full-color artwork.

• Presents drawing, painting, and shading techniques and styles in an easy-to-understand format
• Accessible to artists of all levels

Discover your inner artist with Pastels For Dummies and make your artwork come alive!

Leseprobe

Pastels For Dummies®

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

What You’re Not to Read

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Getting Started

Part II: The Lowdown on Beginning Techniques

Part III: Heading to the Next Level: Intermediate Techniques

Part IV: Drawing Places and People

Part V: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Getting Started

Chapter 1: The Lowdown on Pastel Basics

You and Toulouse: Why Artists Love Pastels

A love affair with color

The variety of stick pastels

The ease and intuitiveness of making art

Perusing Pastels and Paraphernalia

Pastels

Papers and boards

Basic equipment

What you need to get started: Your basic list

Where to Work: A Room (or Table) of Your Own

Starting a Sketchbook

Embracing a Drawing Philosophy

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Pastels

Identifying the Basic Ingredients

Understanding pigments

Grasping how binders bind

Noting other ingredients in your pastels

Eyeing the Different Types of Pastels

Chalk pastels

Oil pastels and oil sticks

Chapter 3: Assembling Your Materials

Preparing Yourself for Your Shopping Experience

Setting a budget

Keeping quality in mind

Making a shopping list

Knowing where to shop

Eyeing the Essential Materials You Need

A basic pastel starter set

Something to draw on: Supports for pastels

Looking at Other Equipment and Supplies

Checking out other practical stuff you may want

Blenders

Fixatives

Supplies for health and cleanliness concerns

Sighting sticks and viewfinders

Identifying other miscellaneous supplies

Storing Your Supplies

Chapter 4: Preparing to Work

Setting Up Your Own Workspace

Choosing between a dedicated space and a dual-use space

Working with the space you have

Choosing equipment for your dedicated space

Creating a healthy, dust-free workspace

Getting in the Right Mindset for the Pastel Process

Keeping it simple

Giving yourself permission to make mistakes

Making a commitment

Being objective and gaining perspective

Part II: The Lowdown on Beginning Techniques

Chapter 5: Building Basic Drawing Skills

Using the Tools of the Trade

Finding your scene with a viewfinder

Sighting and measuring with a sighting stick

Mastering Basic Drawing Strategies

Getting started with basic shapes

Getting the gist with gesture drawing

Constructing drawings transparently

Making linear perspective easy

Knowing when to try more advanced techniques

Combining Photographs Using Linear Perspective

Acting Like an Artist

Working from what you see, not just from your imagination

Building visual language skills

Making thumbnail sketches

Chapter 6: Diving Into the Drawing Process

Getting Ready to Draw: Planning and Preparing

Choosing your subjects: Start easy

Arranging your subjects with a viewfinder

Setting your lighting

Making thumbnail sketches

Choosing and situating your drawing surface

Putting Pastels to Paper: Beginning the Pastel Drawing

Laying out your drawing: Making the first marks

Checking for accuracy

Adding Color: The Layering Process

Exploring the basics to layering

Working from general to specific

Using workable fixatives to allow more layers

Bringing the image up in layers

Finding light and dark areas

Making corrections

Deciding when your drawing is finished

Project: Draw a Pear

Chapter 7: Picking Papers for Pastels

Grasping Paper Basics

Weight

Composition

pH neutrality

Tooth and surface

Lightfastness

Encountering Different Kinds of Papers

Drawing papers

Printmaking and watercolor papers

Choosing a Surface that Fits Your Goal

Smooth surfaces

Rough surfaces

Preparing Your Own Surface

Using ready-made solutions

Making your own surface

Toning Your Own Paper

Choosing a color

Laying down a tone: The how-to

Handling and Storing Paper

Project: A Simple Still Life on Smooth and Textured Papers

Chapter 8: Exploring What You Can Do with Pastels

Establishing a Drawing with Line

Thinking about line variation

Underdrawing: Making initial lines

Finding contours

Looking through objects

Creating emphasis with color

Project: Still life on black

Creating Tonal Drawings

Grasping tones

Finding the shapes of light and dark areas

Project: Eggs on colored paper

Bringing Lines and Tones Together

Project: Going Bananas

Chapter 9: Making Your Mark

Understanding How Marks Create Mood

Creating Marks for Realistic 3-D Objects

Hatching

Massing color

Considering Blending Techniques

Whipping Up Some Creative Textures

Project: Nine Parts, One Experimental Masterpiece

Chapter 10: Making Your Work Look Real with Shadows and Solid Forms

Illuminating News: Creating Shadows

Grasping how a light’s position affects a cast shadow

Modeling the lights and darks

Seeing how colors make shadows

Adding Dimension to Your Scene

Working with a broken stroke

Thinking about edges

Project: You Say Tomato . . .

Chapter 11: Pastels, Color, and the Big Picture

A Simple Color Primer in Pastels

Describing colors

Getting acquainted with the color wheel: Hue

Grasping value and intensity

Looking at Real Color and Invented Color

Understanding what you see

Considering the importance of value

Creating Harmony: Color Chords

Using light and dark colors

Using cool and warm colors

Project: Using analogous colors in objects

Incorporating Contrast Creates Interest

Adding Depth with Color

Making objects appear near

Making objects appear farther away

Project: Exploring How Color Chords Affect a Composition

Chapter 12: Starting with Still Life

Starting Your Pastel off the Paper

Arranging an interesting still life grouping

Lighting your arrangement well

Using a viewfinder

Making a rough sketch

Sighting and measuring to refine your drawing

Drawing Your Pastel Still Life

Laying out the initial drawing

Blocking in the basic values

Developing and refining the forms

Preventing Rookie Problems

Righting leaning shapes

Rounding out flat-bottomed cylinders

Separating intersecting masses

Project: A Still Life Self-Portrait

Part III: Heading to the Next Level: Intermediate Techniques

Chapter 13: Capturing Shiny or Textured Surfaces

Adding Some Sparkle: Modeling Metallic Surfaces

Breaking down a metal’s look

Capturing all those reflections

Project: A simple metal object

Giving Your Surfaces Transparency: Seeing Through Glass Objects

Getting a head start with glass-drawing tips

Looking closely at shapes and distortions

Knowing when to blend and not to blend

Project: Looking through glass

Creating Textures

Nailing down form before moving on to pattern

Identifying an object’s texture and letting the strokes work for you

Building complexity with color variety

Project: A furry subject

Chapter 14: Finding Your Artistic Voice

Juggling Technique and Ideas

Elevating technique by focusing on ideas

Project: Putting yourself in the picture

Finding Ways to Amp Up Your Unique Artistic Voice

Exploring your own point of view

Working on odd surfaces

Experimenting with materials

Examining other ways you can tap into your own creativity

Project: An Expressionistic Work with Distortion

Chapter 15: Trying Abstraction

Defining Abstraction

Getting Started in the Abstracting Basics

Simplifying forms

Repeating forms

Tapping Into Your Abstract Side

Stream of consciousness: Letting out your inner self on paper

Making artwork about ideas

Sampling Different Kinds of Abstraction

Project: Abstracting a realistic scene in two steps

Project: Dabbling in Cubism

Part IV: Drawing People and Places

Chapter 16: Going the Scenic Route: Sketching the Landscape

Taking Your Studio Outdoors

Preparing to go

Setting up at your work site

Protecting your work

Finding a Good Composition

Collecting Resource Materials

Making rough sketches

Using photographs

Communicating Mood with Landscapes

Exploring the effects of light: Shape and patterns

Taking different atmospheric approaches

Drawing Land and Water

Shaping the flora: Trees and bushes

Depicting water

Illustrating clouds

Project: A Full-Blown Landscape

Chapter 17: Sketching Exteriors and Interiors

Drawing the Outside: Basics for Exteriors

Getting started: Finding the placement

Sketching in the structure lines

Capturing light and shadow

Sketching the Inside: Basics for Interiors

Looking at the room as a box

Sketching windows and doors

Drawing chairs, tables, and other boxy objects

Sketching plants, fabrics, and other natural shapes

Creating the right mood with lighting

Steering Clear of Newbie Mistakes

Remedying common mistakes

Maintaining a single point of view

Project: An Interior Scene

Project: A Village Scene

Chapter 18: Portraits: Capturing Realistic Head Shots

The 4-1-1 on Blocking a Portrait

Getting a handle on proportion

Using the relational method

The 1-2-3 of Blocking in Initial Portrait Drawings

Capturing Features: The Drawing and Modeling How-To

Looking at eyes

Sniffing out noses

Mastering mouths

Exploring ears

Brushing up on hair

Depicting Skin Color

Identifying which colors work

Using unconventional colors

Project: A Step-By-Step Portrait

Chapter 19: Adding People to the Picture

Making Quick Sketches of People

Having Someone Sit for You

Sighting and measuring the body

Eyeing general modeling tips

Fitting Your Model on the Page

Working from the inside out

Drawing foreshortened body parts

Drawing Realistic Hands and Feet

Getting a grip on hands

Jumping into feet

Project: Creating a Seated Portrait

Part V: The Part of Tens

Chapter 20: Ten Great Subjects for Pastel

A Collection of Potted Plants

Donuts or Slices of Pies and Cakes

A Grocery Store Vegetable Display

An Abandoned Building

Your Backyard

A Friend at the Beach or Pool

A Still Life of Your Art Materials

A Self-Portrait in a Rearview Mirror

Eggs on a Windowsill

Glasses of Water

Chapter 21: Ten (or So) Ways to Protect and Store Your Art

Store Your Artwork Flat

Handle Your Paper and Works Carefully

Cover Your Work

Allow Art to Touch Only Archival Materials

Use Fixative When Appropriate

Frame Your Work with Glass

Mat and Shrink-Wrap Your Work

Avoid Using Regular Masking Tape

Attach Your Work Properly to Its Backing

Pastels For Dummies®

by Sherry Stone & Anita Giddings

Pastels For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009941928

ISBN: 978-0-470-50842-8

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Authors

Sherry Stone is a Senior Lecturer in Foundation Studies at Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design. She has taught beginning courses in art and design for more than 20 years. Stone co-authored Oil Painting For Dummies (Wiley) with Anita Giddings. This is the second book they’ve written together.

Anita Giddings is an artist and educator living in Indianapolis, Indiana. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from IU Herron School of Art and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana State University. Giddings is currently a faculty member of IU Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Dedication

For my father, who helped make this possible. —SS

For my mother for all her support over the years, and for my students. —AG

Authors’ Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Chad Sievers, Mike Baker, and Megan Knoll at Wiley Pub-lishing for their expertise, help, and patience in this project. We are also indebted to the rest of the staff at Wiley for their efforts to make us look good and get this book to press. In addition, we extend our thanks to Sari Gaby, our technical editor.

We also thank our colleagues in the faculty and staff at Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. We would especially like to thank Dean Valerie Eickmeier and William Potter at Herron for giving us the time and space to complete this book.

We wish to express our gratitude to Susan Watt Grade, Carolyn Springer, Carol White, Kyle Miller, and Christine Plantenga for the loan of their artwork. We also thank Carolyn Springer and Mary Ann Davis for allowing us to photograph their studios. Our thanks also go to Corrine Hull and Elizabeth Kenney for daring to be photographed as they worked, and to Debbie Masten and others who modeled for drawings throughout the book. We wish to thank artist Diane Steele for her assistance in writing and for personal support. We also thank Mike McCune of Multimedia Art Supplies and Colleen Richeson Maxey of Jack Richeson & Co. for their support in this project.

Our endless thanks go to our own teachers over the years who guided us. We also express our gratitude to our families, friends, and students for putting up with us during this project, and to everyone at Herron School of Art and Design who acted as our sounding board and gave us advice over the past few months.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Chad R. Sievers

Senior Acquisitions Editor: Mike Baker

Copy Editor: Megan Knoll

Assistant Editor: Erin Calligan Mooney

Editorial Program Coordinator: Joe Niesen

Technical Editor: Sari Gaby

Editorial Manager: Michelle Hacker

Editorial Assistant: Jennette ElNaggar

Art Coordinator: Alicia B. South

Cover Photos: Sherry Stone and Anita Giddings

Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Kristie Rees

Layout and Graphics: Carl Byers, Samantha Cherolis, Melissa K. Jester

Special Art: Sherry Stone, Anita Giddings

Proofreader: Shannon Ramsey

Indexer: Potomac Indexing, LLC

Special HelpElizabeth Staton

Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies

Kristin Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies

Ensley Eikenburg, Associate Publisher, Travel

Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel

Publishing for Technology Dummies

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User

Composition Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Introduction

Nothing cries color like pastel. Maybe you came to pastel because you love Degas’s ballet dancers, Mary Cassatt’s simple domestic scenes, or Toulouse-Lautrec’s dance hall scenes. Regardless, when you pick up pastels, you join the legions of artists over time who have been seduced by the medium’s color and rewarded by its endless possibilities. A box of pastels can produce anything from a few simple sketches to elaborate artworks that beg to be called paintings. Pastels are limited only by the potential you see in them to create art.

In this book, we help you get started with pastel. If you have a little experience, we can help you fill in the gaps or give you the tools to take your artwork farther. As we help you build your skills, we also help you develop your voice as an artist. You can find many good books on pastel, but what sets this book apart is that it’s geared to help you work at your own level, even if you have little experience with art.

This book follows our philosophy as artists and teachers. We bring to these pages the concepts and techniques we use every day in our classrooms.

About This Book

We designed this book with you in mind. We’ve taught hoards of students over the years and know how difficult learning on your own can be, but we believe you can discover how to make beautiful pastel drawings. In this book, we arm you with everything we think you need to know to establish a good foundation for making pastel drawings and to continue to develop as an artist for years to come. We don’t teach you tricks — we lay out a time-honored process that helps you become the artist you were meant to be, not the shadow of someone else.

The format for this book is easy to follow. We start with pastel basics so that you can get a handle on the technical aspects of pastel and paper and set yourself up to work efficiently. Because drawing and modeling forms is so important to pastel, we provide some easy-to-follow instructions for mark-making and give you a basic primer in drawing and color. After applying those skills in simple still life, we explore ways that you can express yourself and experiment with different approaches to pastel images. Finally, we help you get started working in genre painting — landscape, portrait, and figure — so that you can have a broad range of skills to build on as you move forward with your pastel artwork.

Throughout this book, you find sketchbook exercises and step-by-step instructions for projects. Never fear if you’re a rank beginner — we don’t assume you already know how to draw well. We provide beginning strategies for drawing and include step-by-step sketchbook exercises so that you can practice your new skills. On the other hand, if you come to pastel with a little drawing under your belt, you can tackle complex subjects and new ways to make art.

We limit the discussion in this book to chalk pastels because of their versatility and ease of use. Chalk pastels can look like both drawings and paintings, and they’re friendly to anyone just beginning to draw. Even though oil pastels have the advantage of generating less dust, we advise you to save them for later. They’re more difficult to control if you’re still working on your drawing skills.

Color is an important part of working with pastel. To help you develop fluency, we include chapters that give you a good foundation in color. Additionally, a running conversation about the role color plays in an artwork weaves through this book. We also refuse to let you get away without talking about designing your artwork well and how to avoid rookie mistakes.

As you work your way through the book, be patient with yourself. Give yourself permission to make mistakes and think of them as learning opportunities. Forget the word talent. Hard work, a willingness to learn, and being objective as you evaluate your work are worth much more. If you work regularly, you discover something new with every pastel work you do. If you have a troublesome drawing, don’t get bogged down by it; just move on and churn out more work.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate this book, we use a few conventions:

We use italics for emphasis and to highlight new ideas and terms that we define within the reading.

We use boldface text to indicate a set of numbered steps (you follow these steps for many of the projects). We also use boldface to highlight keywords or phrases in bulleted text.

Web addresses appear in monofont.

The main drawing projects in the book have their own project headings so that you can easily identify them as you flip through the chapters. Every project tells you what you need, when you need it. Before you start any project, read all the way through the steps to make sure that you have the supplies you need.

What You’re Not to Read

This book is set up so that you can find the information easily. This book is full of essential material, but you can skip over the sidebars if you’re short on time. These shaded gray boxes house information that’s interesting or technical but not necessarily need-to-know; skip ’em for now and come back later if you need to.

Foolish Assumptions

In writing this book, we have made some assumptions aboutyou:

You have done a little drawing in your life but want to improve those skills.

You’re interested in and appreciate art. You may have a little knowledge of art history, but only artists commonly known by people on the street.

You like pastels and may have tried them but are looking for ways to avoid muddying them and want to go beyond merely “coloring” with them.

How This Book Is Organized

We’ve organized this book so that you can drop into the conversation at any point and flip from one area of the book to another following your nose. At the same time, if you prefer to work sequentially, the organization supports that approach as well.

Part I: Getting Started

In this part, we bring you up to speed on the basics of pastels and help you gather materials and set up a space to work. We give you an overview of the different kinds of color drawing materials and how they’re different from pastels. We also discuss what working with pastels is like.

Part II: The Lowdown on Beginning Techniques

We discuss the basics of working with pastels in a comprehensive way in this part. It walks you through the basic skills you need to address each step of the process and then begins with an overview of the process of making a pastel drawing. We help you choose papers and apply pastels in different ways, as well as give you the skinny on when and how to use spray fixatives. We provide primers for basic color and drawing and give you concrete techniques for using value to develop the drawing so that it looks realistic. Finally, we pull it all together in a full-blown still life.

Part III: Heading to the Next Level: Intermediate Techniques

Part III is all about taking the skills in the earlier parts and finding your voice as an artist. It begins by walking you through some techniques for subjects that many people find difficult, such as glass and metal. Then we look at expressive ways to work with pastels. We finish with a wild dive into abstraction and give a nod to conceptual approaches to pastel and art-making. Buckle your seatbelts, because you may never look at pastel the same way again after this part!

Part IV: Drawing Places and People

In Part IV, we bring you right up to speed in portrait and drawing people, with easy to understand steps for drawing realistic people even if you have little or no experience. If landscape is your thing, we address how to approach landscape, including drawing on-site.

Part V: The Part of Tens

This part is chock-full of ideas for projects for those days when your brain just can’t think of anything fresh to draw. Part V also provides essential advice for handling and storing your artwork, something you may not consider until you find yourself with a pastel drawing in hand and no safe place to put it.

Icons Used in This Book

The icons you see in the margins direct you to some really cool information:

This icon saves you time and energy by letting you know an easier method for doing something.

You know you’re looking at important information whenever you see this icon. It may serve to remind you of something already covered elsewhere in the book, and at other times it lets you know to remember this informative tidbit for later.

This icon addresses potential dangers to you or your artwork so you can avoid potential headaches.

This icon points out practical sketchbook exercises you can practice in your own sketchbook to help you develop your skills.

Where to Go from Here

We wrote this book so that you don’t need to read it sequentially. If you’re just starting out, we suggest that you start with Part II, which gives you an intensive course in the basics. If you have been working with pastel for a while, some of the information in Part II may fill in the gaps of your experience, but you may also be ready to dive into Parts III and IV for some more advanced fun. You can also feel free to check out the Table of Contents or Index to find a topic that piques your interest.

The bottom line: Have fun. Laugh at the awkward drawings you do, practice and experiment, and relish your successes, regardless of how small they are.

Part I

Getting Started

In this part . . .

Pastels are more than pretty sticks of color — they’re one of the most flexible art mediums around. Artists have used them in one form or another for hundreds of years, and you too can do almost anything with them.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of working with pastels and why artists love them so much. In Chapter 2, we introduce you to the various kinds of pastels available and give you some insight into how they’re made; Chapter 3 digs into the other materials you may need. Working with pastels isn’t just about materials, however; you also need a place to draw, and Chapter 4 gives you the lowdown on setting up a workspace.

Chapter 1

The Lowdown on Pastel Basics

In This Chapter

Understanding the historic and modern popularity of pastels

Diving into pastel materials and equipment

Thinking about your workspace

Making the most of your sketchbook

Developing your own drawing philosophy

To make an artwork is to tap into the pursuit of creative expression that everyone has inside. Many people gain a true appreciation for the arts by making art. For some, the creative outlet is music or writing, but for others the drive to create a visual artwork is the outlet of choice. Many people’s first experiences making pictures involved a crayon. The colors offered many ways to express the world around them. Sky and trees, mom and dad, brother and sister — each one was a different color.

And here you are as an adult now, feeling the same creative urge. Making pictures is a wonderful thing to pick up again; wax crayons are fine and can offer some satisfaction for color, but they don’t offer a lot of possibilities for application. On the other hand, nothing beats pastels for ease of use and glorious color. You may have already had some experience with pastels because they’re a popular art material for children and adults, but whether you’ve been working with pastels for a while or are just starting out, pastels are just plain fun. You can take classes that concentrate on pastel techniques, or just pick the sticks up and figure it out on your own with the help of our book.

Working with pastels is quite intuitive. A piece of pastel is just a powdery, sophisticated crayon, after all. Like any material, they can be a little tricky to work with, however, and the different brands of pastels and pastel-related materials vary tremendously. That’s why we wrote this book: to give you a firm grounding in the many ways you can use pastels as an art material and offer some insider information about the various approaches to making images with pastels. In this chapter, we give you an overview of the book, walk you through the process of drawing with pastels, and point you to the right chapters for more details.

You and Toulouse: Why Artists Love Pastels

Pastels are a favorite of artists because they offer the rich color of oil painting but the ease of use of a drawing material. These qualities have made pastels popular through the centuries, with such diverse artists as Rosalba Carriera, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and R.B. Kitaj. As a matter of fact, whether the artworks produced with pastel are considered drawings or paintings is up for debate. For now, we can say that the results are beautiful, whatever you may call them, and they’re an important part of an artist’s materials and tools.

Pastels have actually been in use for many centuries. Making art with some sort of chalk dates back at least to the early Renaissance, where you can easily find drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries in red, black, and white chalk. Over the centuries, the manufacturers of pastels have increased the number of colors available, and mass-production has standardized their quality to the great benefit of today’s artist.

Now drawing with pastels is easier than ever. If you’re new to the world of pastels, you may not realize what they have to offer you, so the following sections highlight some reasons why pastels are a popular medium, which is another word for art material. You may fall in love with pastels for the same reasons, or some of your own. We cover the various ways of working with pastels in Chapters 6, 9, and 10.

Pastels do have a few drawbacks. The sticks are fragile and break easily with too much pressure or if you drop them. The surface of the drawing is also fragile and can be easily smudged. Sometimes a novice is tempted to over-blend the applied pastel, which can muddy and dull the colors. Plus, the pastels can produce a lot of dust as you work. These characteristics can be frustrating for a beginner, but they’re easy to deal with. We cover handling these and other problems in Chapter 6.

A love affair with color

Color is the foremost reason to use pastels. Pastels grab you when you first open your box and see all the luscious colors at a glance — and that doesn’t even account for the variety of colors of paper you can choose from. The color of the paper becomes a part of the final effect of your artwork, deepening the range of colors possible. And because the pastels go on dry, the sparkling color stays true. Each applied color visually enhances the other colors to create a complex mosaic of color. We devote Chapter 11 to color theory.

If you need further proof of pastel’s color prowess, consider its popularity with the Impressionists, who were known for creating artwork made up of color and light. Their interest in fresh, spontaneous marks and the juxtaposition of saturated color made pastel an ideal art medium for Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt, among others.

The variety of stick pastels

Pastels are a part of a larger group of art materials that come in a stick. They all have different qualities and uses. Here we offer an overview to help you understand a bit of the history and variety of colored drawing materials that are applied in a stick form.

Depending on your preference and style, you can use a wide variety of pigment in a stick to create a masterpiece. Some of the varieties you may encounter when drawing with color include the following:

Chalk pastels: We focus on this type of pastels in this book; in fact, when we refer to pastels, we mean these powdery wonders. Calling them chalk pastels also helps differentiate them from other types of materials, such as oil pastels, wax crayons, and colored pencils. Of course, many artists never refer to pastels as chalk, but the similarities between pastels and colored chalk can’t be ignored. Both are dry drawing materials with powdery colored pigments. The difference is in the degree of intense saturated color and their intended use. Pastels intended for fine art are made of pigment and binder, usually gum tragacanth. They may also include some filler materials to modify the degree of hardness or to make the pastel more workable. Chalk is meant for blackboards and sidewalk drawings; we don’t recommend using a set of Rembrandt brand pastels to make a hopscotch grid.

Conté crayons: These old drawing materials have a more velvety texture than chalk pastels because they contain a clay binder. Years ago, conté crayons only came in traditional colors of white, reddish brown, brown, and black, but now they’re available in many more colors, some of which are similar to chalk pastels.

Wax crayons and oil pastels: Unlike chalk pastels, neither of these materials would ever be mistaken for a dry drawing material. These both have a lot in common; the difference is the degree of softness of the crayon. Where a child’s wax crayon feels, well, waxy, an oil pastel has a greasy feel. You can blend and layer these materials like you can chalk pastels, but the appearance isn’t as soft.

Other, newer items: You may find other new items on the market: oil sticks that feel more like paint than a crayon and pastels in a pan that you apply with a sponge. Experiment to see what varieties speak to you.

Check out Chapter 2, where we discuss the different types of chalk pastels available in more detail.

The ease and intuitiveness of making art

Another great reason to use pastels is that they’re super easy. You don’t have to spend a lot of time preparing like you do with oil or acrylic painting. You just pick up and begin drawing! Although the working methods are similar to painting, other factors make pastels easier to use and different from traditional painting:

They allow you, the artist, to quickly get down ideas and make initial sketches for work in other media.

They’re more portable than paints — no palette or brushes to carry along — and they travel very well when you properly store them in a secure case.

They lend themselves to a variety of application methods. As with other drawing materials, you hold pastels in your fingers instead of applying from the end of a brush. This flexibility lets you apply pastel in a bunch of different ways — from the point of a pencil to the delicate powder of soft pastels.

They allow you to do things that paint doesn’t, such as work spontaneously without waiting for the work to dry and experiment with color easily by mixing right on the paper rather than on a palette.

Check out Chapters 8 and 9 for more on what you can do with your pastels.

Part of the joy of working with pastels is that you can do it very intuitively. Drawing with pastels isn’t overly complex. In fact, essentially you really have only a few steps to create a drawing. Here are the basic steps to apply pastels to create an artwork. We cover these steps in detail later in the book.

1. Lay out the general sketch of your image.

2. Apply the pastel colors to block in the value patterns in the scene.

The value patterns are the areas of light and dark colors. This process creates the underdrawing, which establishes the color and where the light source is coming from in your scene.

3. After you complete the underdrawing, you can apply a light spray of workable fixative (see Chapter 3 for more on fixative) to set the image.

Fixative also helps you beef up the tooth (texture) so you can put down additional layers of color.

4. Alternate the pattern of applying pastel and sealing it with workable fixative until you complete the image.

We cover the ins and outs of layering color, applying fixative, and working with different papers in Chapters 7 and 8.

Perusing Pastels and Paraphernalia

Pastels are easy to work with, but they do require some special equipment and supplies to make the most of their features. They’re similar to painting in their color, but they go on dry and powdery like charcoal. You have to pay attention to the different hardness of the pastels and the type of paper you apply them to. You also have to take care of the artworks after you’re done, which involves some specialized materials and equipment. We cover a lot of these particular materials and equipment in Chapter 3, but the following sections give you a preview.

Pastels

When you walk into an art supply store, you may be intimidated by all the different types of pastels available. Like we mention earlier in this chapter, we help reduce your anxiety a bit and focus just on chalk pastels in this book. You can find three general types of chalk pastels:

Hard pastels or semi-hard pastels: They usually come in square sticks. They’re used in the initial stages of a drawing to lay down basic shapes and colors.

Soft pastels: They’re fragile and delicate. They put down a lot of color quickly and are used later in a project.

Pastel pencils: They’re hard or semi-hard pastel in a pencil. They can be sharpened to a point and are used for the initial drawing of an image and for final linear marks.

Pastel sets range from simple collections to big sets in fancy boxes. Pastels come in preselected sets of 12, 24, 30, or up to hundreds. You can also buy the pastels individually, but that’s way too many decisions if you’re new to the material. Your best choice for a beginning selection is a set that offers a broad assortment of colors. We advise you to buy a set of 24 hard pastels (Prismacolor’s Nupastel line is perfect for this), a set of 30 to 60 half sticks of soft pastels, such as Rembrandt brand, and a set of 12 pastel pencils (CarbOthello is a good brand). We cover this topic in more detail in Chapter 2.

Papers and boards

The paper or pastel board that you use for your work is also a big deal. The names of the various papers may sound like a lot of insider lingo, but we give you the information to make good choices.

Pastels require papers that have a rough surface. If your paper is too slick, the pastels are going to just fall off as dust. For the pastels to properly adhere to the paper, it must have a rough texture or tooth. Sometimes the roughness feels like the texture of a soft paper towel, and other times it feels more like sandpaper (see Figure 1-1 for an example).

Figure 1-1: A drawing on sand-paper.

Paper choice is a key decision in making a drawing. As you draw a pastel stick across the surface of a sheet of paper, pigment becomes imbedded in the fibers. Depending on the types of paper you’re working on, the pastels reveal the texture of the surface, whether that’s a waffle pattern, a soft film of powder, or a rough and gritty buildup of color. For starting out, you can’t go wrong with buying charcoal paper. The texture holds onto the pastel particles and the papers are offered in a variety of colors.

You can work on white paper, but a deep paper color adds to the overall effect of your finished piece. Little bits of paper color show through the pastel and contribute to the overall color of the work. You can select a color that harmonizes with the subject, such as blue for a scene with water, or you can select a contrasting color, such as red for a green landscape. Check out Figure 1-2, which uses a different paper color.

Figure 1-2: A drawing on blue pastel paper.

Pastel boards are rigid pieces of cardboard, foam core, or hardboard with a surface suitable for pastels. Sometimes the surface is pastel paper that is adhered to the board and sometimes the board has had a gritty surface applied to it, making it ideal for pastel artworks. Pastel boards provide a more stable surface for your artworks and aren’t as likely to be damaged as paper. You can read more about picking papers and boards for pastels in Chapter 7.

Basic equipment

Aside from your pastels and paper, you need a bit of other equipment. You can get by with minimal supplies, but at some point, you may want to invest in a few extras to make the process easier, keep your materials undamaged, and explore additional options for application. Pastel artists have drawing boards to support the paper; artists’ tape or clips to secure the paper; and sprays to set the drawing. All these items allow you to work on a steady surface, build up charming layers of colors, and keep your equipment clean and undamaged. Many artists also use tools for blending such as soft sponges, blending stumps (also called tortillons), cotton swabs or paper towels twisted into points. You can’t help but use your fingers from time to time, though.

Keeping your pastels organized is an important consideration as well. If you have a large number of pastels, storing them in a box keeps the sticks cleaner, unbroken, and more organized. A piece of terry cloth allows you to lay out your sticks and keep them from moving around. We cover all the details about supplies in Chapter 3.

What you need to get started: Your basic list

Pastels vary quite a bit in hardness and texture from one brand to another. We advise that you start with a few sets of different hardnesses and then decide which suits your individual working style. Three different sets cover most of your needs as you begin: hard or semi-hard pastels, soft pastels, and pastel pencils, in a general assortment of colors. You can complete most of the projects and exercises in this book with the following supplies:

Set of 60 half sticks of Rembrandt brand soft pastels in assorted colors

Set of 24 Prismacolor Nupastel hard pastels in assorted colors

Set of 12 CarbOthello pastel pencils in assorted colors

Workable spray fixative (which we discuss in Chapter 3)

23-x-26-inch or similar-sized drawing board

Pastel or charcoal paper

A sketchbook with at least 30 pages (50- to 100-pound paper — see Chapter 7 for more on paper weight)

In the beginning, assorted color sets are more useful than the specialized sets you can get for landscape or portrait work. Later, you can purchase individual sticks of colors as you need them or special sets for different subjects. For example, you may find that you always run out of yellow or that you need several different types of violet. These preferences reflect your own working style, and you want to be able to respond to it easily without running out to the store again. You can find more information about pastels in Chapter 2.

Where to Work: A Room (or Table) of Your Own

When you’re ready to start drawing with your pastels, you need a designated space where you can spread out your supplies and start sketching. Having a room devoted to your art making is ideal, but don’t let not having a dedicated studio space stand in your way. Working with pastels doesn’t require a lot of space — all you need is a work surface for the drawing, a place to lay out your pastels, and a table and light for your setup.

If you don’t have a dedicated studio space, you can create a work surface in a shared space, such as an office or kitchen. Pastels are very portable, and the equipment is easy to stow away when you aren’t working with it. Plus, cleanup is a snap. A table or desk works fine for a temporary space to work.

Working in shared spaces with pastel presents few problems. Pastel is a dry medium, and pastels have no smell. They may attract small hands if you have children, so find a secure place to store your work and materials if you’re working in an area with curious young fans.

Pastels work very well on the road as well. Your supplies and equipment are portable and you can take your equipment where you want to work. Plein air work — making art out in the open air — requires a bit of planning, much like camping. You need to be able to work comfortably and to see your subject clearly. In Chapter 16, you can read about how to plan and create pastel landscapes on-site.

Although pastels are safe materials to use and don’t require any volatile chemicals for cleanup (unless you consider soap and water volatile), you still need to consider two safety issues when setting up your workspace:

Pastel dust: Pastels create a lot of dust, and breathing in the dust and pigments isn’t healthy for anyone. For those with breathing problems, allergies, or asthma, the dust can be irritating. Resisting the temptation to shake or blow on the drawing to remove excess pastel is the best way to avoid getting dust in the air.

Ventilation for using spray fixative:Spray fixative is a sealer that allows you to add more tooth to layers of pastels for continued work or to apply a final finish spray to fix the pastel artwork and make it less prone to smudging. Using fixative is an optional step, but be sure to use it with proper ventilation. Spraying fixative in an open garage or porch or outside in decent weather works fine. You can read more about safety issues in Chapter 6.

Starting a Sketchbook

Keeping a sketchbook is a time-honored activity most artists participate in. As a beginner, you can use your sketchbook in two ways:

Skill building: You practice drawing objects and people in quick sketches so that you don’t struggle with them when you make your pastel drawings. Spending as little as 15 minutes a day drawing objects in your sketchbook from observation (based only on what you see, not on what you think the object should look like) can make a huge difference in your skill level.

Idea generating: Sketchbooks are also receptacles for ideas, which is what seasoned artists use them for. You can sketch and write about your ideas, but you can also cut and paste articles and pictures into it. After you have used your sketchbook for a while, it becomes a rich journal, reflecting and recording your thoughts and attitudes about your life and view of the world.

Your sketchbook can be spiral bound or hardback, but choose one with good-quality paper that works well with your regular graphite pencil as well as with pastels. Everyone has his or her own preferences for size and shape. Some artists prefer small sketchbooks that fit in their back pocket or purse, and others carry around larger versions. After a bit of experimentation, you develop your own preferences based on your own life and work methods.

Your sketchbook is a volume of blank pages just waiting for you to fill them up. Throughout this book, you can find exercises to help you do just that. They provide directed practice that supports the longer projects and helps you build your skills. The following are a couple of sketchbook exercises to get you started and acquainted with your new friend.

Start your sketchbook with drawings of simple objects from around the house. These drawings are quick, no more than 20 to 30 minutes each. Use regular pencil (or pastel pencils if you have them already) and draw each of the following objects on a separate page: a ball, a book, and a cup. Be sure to work from the actual objects and not from what they look like in your mind. (See the following section for more on working from observation.) Refer to Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3: A sketchbook allows you to practice drawings.

A sketchbook is for notes as well as drawings. Make two columns on a page in your sketchbook. In one, write what you think your strengths are as you begin making pastel drawings. In the other, write what you think you may struggle with.

Finally, include a specific goal for your work in pastels. That may just be to find a pastime that you enjoy, or it may be something loftier like exhibiting your work in a local gallery. Making a note of this goal helps you plan your journey as you work.

Embracing a Drawing Philosophy

Many artists started drawing by copying cartoons as children. They drew images from their imaginations and later, when they wanted to make their work look more “real,” they graduated to working from photographs. Interestingly, few ever did what they really needed to do, which was draw from the real objects.

Drawing from observation is a critical philosophy for developing skills in drawing because it increases the kind and quality of images you can make. If you don’t push yourself to widen your boundaries, you stagnate.

When you draw from observation, you translate the three-dimensional image you see into a two-dimensional image on your paper. You look at the image, determine how to turn it into two-dimensions, and then rely on hand–eye coordination to draw the image the way you want. When you draw from photographs, however, you look at a two-dimensional image and then draw a two-dimensional image on paper. The translation has already been done for you. That may sound easier, but you don’t get the experience of critically thinking about how to recreate the dimensions, so in the long run, you’re making your drawing harder. The camera is also very selective and incomplete in the information it records. Your eyes are much more reliable and complete as a tool, so committing to using them as part of your training is an important prong in your philosophy for drawing.

Another important point in your drawing philosophy is making a habit of working from general to specific. When you work general to specific, you find the big, general shapes and go through a process of breaking the shapes down to the more specific forms. It also leaves you the flexibility to adjust your methods as problems arise in the early stages. (Check out Chapter 6 for more info.)

You can apply this process in many ways in your typical pastel drawing. You begin your initial drawing with big, general forms and then go through a process of refining and defining them. You block in your colors generally and then go through a process of refining and developing them. Every part and stage of the drawing goes through this process. Working on small areas at the expense of the rest of the drawing makes those areas too precious and limits your ability to make decisions about your work. Though you should be willing to sacrifice any part of the drawing for the good of the whole, the decisions you make while working the layering process helps keep those tough choices to a minimum.

Chapter 2

Getting to Know Your Pastels

In This Chapter

Sorting out the ingredients in pastels

Differentiating between hard and soft chalk pastels

Understanding how oil pastels differ from chalk pastels

Walk down the drawing aisles in any art supply store and you see dozens of different kinds and brands of color media. Fat round sticks, skinny square sticks, and pencils of every color imaginable — this experience can be like Christmas morning for some people. Behind the dazzling array of colors, you can discover materials that behave in vastly different ways. To help you get better acquainted with the wide variety available to you, this chapter sorts out the characteristics of the various kinds of pastels you encounter and helps you recognize how these pastels differ from other color media.

When you’re just starting out, grab a set of inexpensive pastels to help you decide whether you want to pursue this medium. If you do decide to continue working with pastels, knowing a little technical information about them can help you make decisions about which to buy. Find more information on start-up supplies in Chapter 3.

Identifying the Basic Ingredients

The ingredients in pastels determine how they behave and give them characteristics that set them apart from other materials. At the same time, they can be easily confused with other materials used for drawing. They are similar because all art materials are made from essentially the same materials: pigments and binder. Other ingredients are also added to adjust the value or brilliance of a color, to make the material safer or more economical, or to improve the way a pastel or other drawing material handles. Although the pigments of chalk pastels, oil pastels, colored pencils, and other color drawing media are similar, the binders are different, so these media behave in distinctive ways. The various kinds of color sticks and pencils look alike if you don’t know what you’re looking at. The following sections help you understand what goes into pastels so that you can understand why they behave as they do and why you can expect different results from pastels than you get from the colored pencils or oil pastels you’ve been using.

Understanding pigments

One of the two main ingredients in pastels is pigment. Pigments are the particles of color you apply to paper to create the image. Understanding pigments is important because each pigment behaves differently. You can begin by looking at how pastel manufacturers use pigments to create a palette for their product lines.

An easy way to keep track of color pigments is to know that color pigments in pastel product lines fall into three categories:

A spectrum of bright hues, with light and dark versions of each: These color pigments have clarity and look like the hues on the color wheel. The light and dark versions are soft and muted in varying degrees.

Black, white, and grayscale colors: Some product lines have sets of warm grays and cool grays.

Traditional earth colors, such as yellow ochre and raw or burnt siennas and umbers: Earth colors may appear to be mixed colors, but what you see is the unadulterated version of the color.

Beyond this basic breakdown, you can discover a lot about pastel pigments from the way the manufacturers name and number their pastels. If the pastels have wrappers, they likely contain information such as the color name, chemical makeup, and lightfastness or permanence rating (see the following sections for more on these qualities). If you order pastels online or by catalog, you see color samples with the names and numbers assigned to each. In the art supply store, the pastels display may show the color numbers, but the store also has brochures that list the color names and numbers for your convenience. The following sections give you more insight on pigments and how they affect the finished product.

Figuring out what the different pigment color names and numbers really mean

In professional- and student-grade lines of pastels, the names of the colors usually refer to one of the following:

The chemical name of the pigment: These names come from the particular chemicals used in the pigment, such as phthalocyanine or quinacridone. A chemical name may read “phthalocyanine green” or “quinacridone violet.”

The traditional names given to specific chemical compositions of the colors: These monikers are simply the names commonly associated with a particular chemical makeup, such as “ultramarine blue” or “Hookers green.”

Chemical and traditional color names are consistent from one manufacturer to another, with only slight variations in color.

After you know the color names, you know what to expect when you look at the pigment. Sometimes, however, pastel manufacturers mix pigments to increase their range of palette colors. The names of mixed pigments can tell you something about the nature of the pigment being used. Here are a few specific terms to look out for:

Hue: If this word follows a pigment name, the manufacturer is indicating that it’s a mixed color that approximates the color of the pigment being named. So, if you pick up a pastel named “cadmium red hue,” you hold a pastel made of a mix of pigments that looks like cadmium red but doesn’t contain cadmium pigments.

Permanent: Some pigments are beautiful but fade easily. If permanent follows the name, you’re looking at a mix that approximates the color of the pigment named but won’t fade like the imitated pigment.

Shade: If this word follows a pigment name, the manufacturer has added black to the color. But you can’t assume that white has been added to the color if the word light follows a pigment name.

Pure: In this case, the word pure indicates an original pigment free of black or white, but this purity doesn’t mean these colors are necessarily the brightest versions of colors on the color wheel.

If you trust the manufacturer, you can usually trust its mixed colors. However, if you find an entire line of pastels with color names that sound like they came from a kid’s crayon box, the quality may not be as high as you like.

Some manufacturers, such as Rembrandt and Winsor and Newton, help you identify different pigment mixes through numeric systems that indicate whether a pastel color is pure or a light or dark mix. The numbers are different for every system, but a simple example is a scale numbering one to ten, with five assigned the brightest version of the color, the lower numbers assigned to the darker, duller colors, and the higher numbers assigned to the lighter colors.

There’s more than one way to make a pigment

For thousands of years, artists used pigments (the particles of color you apply to paper to create your image) manufactured from natural sources, but over the last few hundred years, many man-made pigments have been developed by using chemical processes. As a rule, the relatively new man-made pigments are brighter than those made from natural sources. In fact, the developments of bright new pigments and of tubes that made paints portable influenced the rise of Impressionism.