10 Reasons to Love Pastels: Just Add Water

Well, in honor of being almost to my 200th post on this blog, I thought I'd do a series: 10 Reasons to Love Pastels. Since I spend most of my time scrubbing chalk into my paintings, I'll be focusing on chalk pastels for these posts, and how I've learned to love so many things about them over the last (gulp) nine years of painting with soft pastel.

Reason #10 to love soft pastels: they can be blended with water!

"Down at the Oaks"
9 x 12 Chalk pastel on watercolor paper
Click here to view large or purchase
Chalk pastels are easy to blend with water, by taking a dry pastel painting (on watercolor paper or canvas) and brushing with water.  Click here to see a detailed tutorial on using this method.

You can also paint with wet pastel sticks directly on canvas, or press dry pastel sticks onto a wet paper or canvas to get a unique effect:
"The Road to Reno"
9 x 12 Chalk pastel on flat canvas
Click here to view large or purchase
There are days when I feel like brushing paint with water, but don't have time to mix colors or clean up brushes.  A quick fix for that feeling is to tape down some watercolor paper (or grab a flat canvas) and begin blocking in a painting, focusing on lights and darks.  With a watercolor brush and a little cup of water, a dry pastel quickly becomes a painting that's easy to blend.  I don't have to worry about the painting drying too fast (always a battle here in Southern California), since I can just rewet it with the brush if needed. 

For extra contrast, wetting the pastels first and directly pressing them onto the surface (or pressing the dry pastels into a wet surface) yields a striking balance of light and dark, which can be adjusted with wet or dry layers of chalk that build a textured, bold look.

As long as you save the bright colors and lights for the last layer or two, pastels stay bright and beautiful even when mixed with water, and lend themselves especially well to an impressionist style of painting.

To see more works blended with pastel and water, visit my Recent Works Gallery!

Click on the links below to read some of my articles on Empty Easel:
Is Your Art Blog Helping or Hurting Your Brand?
4 Reasons to Put Your Art Online (Besides Exposure)
If Art is a Language, How Well Do You Communicate?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inspired by Light (Pastels on Canvas)

Image
"Morning Glow" 12 x 16 Chalk Pastel on Flat Canvas Email nicolehilsabeck@yahoo.com if interested in purchasing Been trying to get back into the daily painting routine, which for me either means a small painting a day, or a larger painting spread over two days.  It's a bit of a challenge with the growing belly and a very inquisitive firstborn, but I was lucky enough to get a little extra inspiration from an odd source: Sunday's eclipse. We have beautiful views of the canyon and hills behind us, and I watched the light change on this hill as the sunlight waned throughout the course of the eclipse.  I noted how the normally stunning lights and shadows on this hill were blunted by the general darkening (as opposed to the usual sunrise or sunset glow).  I thought I would be a little more appreciative of those lights and darks and try a painting of the trees and hills the next morning. I completed this painting in several steps, having struggled a little recentl
Read more

Painting Cats

Image
"The Bookeeper" Click here to view auction After many years of painting cats, I've learned a few things.  Every time I start a new cat painting, it follows its own unique path, bringing challenges that I don't seem to face when I paint my more traditional material (landscapes, birds, floral and botanical pieces, etc.) For example, cats don't stay put for too long (unless they're asleep, and even then they'll often stretch and change positions when you're least expecting it).  To combat this challenge, I end up working mostly from photographs.  That means adjusting the proportions, since the camera angle causes some distortion depending on the position and location of the cat. "Eye Contact" Oil Pastel Not for Sale "Side Glance" Oil Pastel Available on Etsy  One of the reasons cats are enjoyable to paint is that they have strong facial expressions.  When I'm painting a cat, I get so focused on rendering the cat
Read more

A Hot Mess of Water Lilies!

Image
"Balboa Water Lilies" 9 x 12 Chalk Pastel on Paper Click here to view large or purchase So, every time I take great photos to paint later it turns into a learning experience for me. We took a little day trip in September down to Balboa Park in San Diego, California.  There wasn't much left of the water lilies after some recent vandalism (a bunch of geniuses decided to have a water gun fight and ended up destroying the lilypond).  It was a strangely hot day for downtown San Diego-- part of a series of heat waves that dogged me throughout the last months of my pregnancy.  I was thrilled to get some pretty photos while down there, particularly of the lilypads and turtles. I love to paint water, but I forget how time consuming it can be.  There are lots of layers involved, and I ended up using fixative as I layered in the lights and darks in this piece.  I also didn't anticipate how difficult it is to depict those peaceful, floating lilypads.  After a couple of
Read more