Pastels are trouble making natures. They rub on touch, flake without a second thought and leave your hands with fine dust of pigment that just found its way to your face even before you could have had lunch. And the artists who fall into them hardly ever succeed in coming out. Find out more!
The dynamics of soft pastels is bordering on the absurd. You are stamping pigment sticks of compressed color over the texturing paper, mixing color with bare fingers, no brushes, no palette, no nervousness of waiting until the layers have dried. It is simply color, force and instinct. Pure and unfiltered.
The best pastel course worth doing begins by demolishing what beginners believe to know. Something of the sort, orderly, controlled, forgiving, is expected by most people. What they receive is more like cutting light with bare hands. The transition may be shocking. It's also thrilling.
Surface selection presents almost everyone with a surprise. Smooth paper does not admit of pastels at all; the color has no desire to remain. It is firmly held in toothy or sanded paper. There are numerous courses that spend a full week of instruction on surface exploration, and only then introduce any actual subject. Maddening? Absolutely. Waste of a minute of frustration? Without question.
It is the actual strangeness of the good kind that is in becoming color. Watercolor makes you go light to dark, there is no exception. Pastels on the contrary do not obey that rule. You have to apply dark and deep colors first on the bottom and draw the light colors over the top and you see the lights pierce right through the surface. It is a simple, repeatable magic trick that absolutely does not grow old.
Assimilation is education in itself. It was famously called by one student as fighting with velvet which is nose painfully. Fingertip, tortillon, dry brush, scrap of cloth,--each of these has varied result altogether. The more difficult lesson, one which no one tells you, is learning that it is better to keep separate.
The initial practice is more inclined to the still life: fruit, ceramic mugs, simple compositions with visible sources of light. However, in time, the majority of the pastelists will drift to landscape. The directness of the medium fits well with skies and foliage, as you can even get on a sunset chase in real time because there is no time when there is dryness that will hold you back.
The great classroom controversy is still fixative spray. One of the camps uses it dutifully between layers. The second one claims that it makes colors flat and murders vivacity. Both parties make a good point. You will hit squarely on one camp than you think.
The mess is non-negotiable. Dust enters sketch books, jacket pockets, coffee cups, and disoriented house pets. But the velocity, the sincerity, the manner in which a bold touch is made good and errors removed with a swipe of the finger - pastels are one of the most immediate mediums you will ever feel.