Pastels are also unashamedly graceless. They spread, they fissure, and in an hour after you set your paint brush down, you will have pigment dust on your hands, your sleeves and more than likely your face. But artists, who find them, seldom revisit them. Read this!
The attraction of soft pastels is a little bit illogical. You are basically sketching with color compressed pigment sticks and pushing color with your fingers onto a piece of paper. No waiting for paint to dry. No mixing on a palette. Uncooked pigment, force and intuition. It’s as immediate as art gets.
The pastel course that works is one that starts by breaking the expectations. The majority of novices believe that it will be like coloring – organized, predictable, and pardoning. It doesn’t. Pastel work is much more sculptural than one cares, nearer to clay modeling than filling in a coloring book.
The initial lesson learned by the teacher is: the surface matters a lot. Velvet paper slides pastels off. You require textured paper, or sanded, in order to hold the pigment. Most students, in their first week, are only familiarized with various surfaces before they can even have the first subject. It’s frustrating. It’s also completely worth it.
Pastels are well suited in layering color. As opposed to water paint where you are confined to light to dark, pastels provide the freedom in both directions. Apply darker colors on the bottom, apply lighter ones on the top and see the areas glowing as though they are. It is some sort of magic of little size, which never seems to grow old.
Blending is its own puzzle. There was a time when one student said that he combined pastels, that it is like a quarrel with velvet– and that is not an exaggeration. You may mix with a fingertip, a tortillon, a loose brush, a cloth, and each will completely give you different results. The finer art is not to blend, however.
The perfect beginning is still life: flowers, fruit, the plainest of objects in daylight. But landscape is the direction many artists tend to gravitate, where pastels are glorious, with the changing skies and trees, moving, in real time, until the light alters, since you have no drying time to keep you there.
The great classroom debate? Fixative spray. Other painters pledge it in between strokes. Some say it kills the colour and the life. Both of them are correct, and it is usually brand-dependent and piece-dependent. You will create your opinion soon enough.
The mess is real. Accept it. Yet the immediacy, the quickness, the manner in which brash strokes are rewarded – pastels can be one of the truthful mediums you will ever take in arms.