The problem with pastels is the image. Majority will look at them and imagine the hobby table of a retired person a soft, old-fashioned, harmless one. Then they will paste to proper paper the first time and then they find themselves making purchases that they can hardly afford to buy and call off weekend plans they certainly had. No one tells you how fast it comes. Click this link!
Soft pastels are pure pigment which has been pressed into sticks. No adhesive, no fluid, no substance of any kind. You use the color with your fingers as a primitive cave artist who also suffers to have a strong feeling of the temperature of light. It has urgency– it has that physical proximity between hand and surface– which oil and acrylic are incapable of recreating.
The thing that amazes most of the people in a structured course is that the first lesson has so little to do with painting. It’s about paper. To be more precise, what is making your whole experience either discovery or snail pacing frustration based on the surface you decide to utilize. Smooth paper sheds pigment. It is caught and gripped by toothy or sandsawed paper. Be prepared to take a whole week exploring the surface before one of the subjects shows up. Students complain. Then the cognition sinks, and the grieving ceases.
Being taught how to put on color rewires your brain. Watercolor forces you to lighten to dark, and protect your whites as they were valuable. Pastels think that that is the rule. Apply a cool gray ground, and apply with a hard push a warm and bright light tones on top. Highlights do not lie on the surface but seem to be glowing inside like there are lights behind the paper. The impact is weird and instantly addictive.
Majoring alone would be enough to occupy a semester. The softness is produced by finger blending. A tortillon produces control and precision. Something more atmospheric is created with a dry bristle brush. But the true art–the fact that makes the difference between a good pastelist and a good capable pastelist–is where to apply the brush to nothing whatever. A mixture of indistinctness is an energy drain. Every competent teacher claims this. They repeat some twelve times in one class.
The early coursework is still dominated by still life due to practical reasons: it is under controlled light, the objects remain still, and the shadows can be read. But landscape is the place most students finally go to, and pastels are virtually inappropriate in it. Changing light conditions? Pastels keep pace. There should be no drying time and therefore it has no excuses.
Fixative spray provokes real conflicts. Apply between layers to fix the pigment and continue or leave surfaces unattended to retain that dense, plush finish that pastels are renowned to represent. Ask five professionals. Gather seven opinions. You can make your opinion up presently.