Pastel Painting Lessons & Techniques

Step 3:

In this image (and sorry for the curvature), I have shown how I work the clouds. For these clouds, I chose a combination of purple and green to achieve my base gray. I do have lots of grays and I do use them often (and even did later in here to adjust tones), but for a base gray I often like to use a combination of some complimentary colors. Here I wanted to have a slightly bluish gray so instead of combining yellow with purple, I chose green.

In this image, you can see the laying in of the base coat of purple in three tints, according to the level of lightness in the cloud. After this, I did exactly the same thing with the green (see the pastel sample below for the shades used) right on top of the purple. Then I blended it with my fingers (though part way through this piece as my finger tips were rapidly disappearing, I made the lovely discovery of "finger cots") and finished it with adjustments using my various grays and white. At many points along the way, I found myself coming back to each cloud again and again and readjusting, especially along the edges of the clouds and sky.

Step 4:

By this stage, I have filled in all of the upper cloud layers and begun working on the lower, far more complicated clouds. I also have filled in the sky along the horizon using more Cerulean and quite a bit of white, with the slightest blush of pink to suggest a continuation of the clouds far beyond the horizon line.

This shows the collection of the pastels that I used for the clouds (along the shelf) and sky (at the bottom). I do have to say that while I tried a bit of the yellows (11-12th from the left), I ultimately decided I did not like them and countered them with more purples and whites.

Along with the greens and lilacs, there were several shades of gray, mostly Davy's and Payne's from Windsor~Newton, and Rembrandt's Green-Gray (a favorite shade of mine for all sorts of things!).