This is a pastel study for the painting I’m going to work on today. I did it on watercolour paper, primed with clear gesso. It was prepared by Clarence Porter for the pastel class I took from him at the Art Gallery of Hamilton last Spring. One of the reasons I signed up for the class was that he provided a wide variety of materials for us to work with, so that we could find out what we liked best, before investing.

I already had a small collection of pastels from taking figure drawing classes at University, but usually we just sketched with them, using a couple of colours. I was interested in trying them out for painting plein air (outdoors), especially in the summer because although acrylics is my preferred medium, they dry up in the heat very fast. Clarence  went over some pastel basics, demonstrating a few techniques.  One thing that I learned is that when you’re doing a painting rather than just a sketch, it is important to start with your darkest darks, and then get progressively lighter. It also helps to work on a support (paper etc) that has a lot of tooth (deep dips) because as you blend in more colours the dips get filled up with pastel and you just can’t grind any more in without making a mess. .

The other thing that was so different to acrylics was I couldn’t just mix to get the colour I wanted. That was a bit frustrating and if I were regularly painting from life with pastels, I would want a much larger selection of colours to capture what I saw. On the flip side, that frustration actually highlights one of my biggest strengths as an artist – developed over more than 20 years of looking at the world through the eyes of an artist and creating artwork – my sense of colour.