Pastel Painting Lessons & Techniques

"Out on the Open Ocean"

By Amy Sanders, PPSCC

Last summer, I took my brother's family on a whale watch off the coast of Cape Cod while they were visiting from Santa Fe. The weather was positively spectacular and we saw plenty of very active whales. This is the first in a series of paintings that I hope will come from the oodles of photographs that I took (with my new digital camera) on that trip.

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This is the image that I worked the most from. It's a digital image, with quite a few problems, not the least of which is the distortion due to the zoom.

And, yes, I do work mostly from photos. The debate will rage on forever I am sure, but for me, a number of factors make the studio a necessity. Carrying my collection of 800+ pastels into the field is simply not practical (actually I did take about 200 once, and dropped one tray into the hog cranberry ...not fun at all to pick up!). Also, my work tends to be so detailed that a single painting can take me 40-50 hours, and I teach full time, so much of my painting time is in bits and snatches. If I were to add the limitations of weather and daylight, I'd never get to paint at all!

A month or so before starting this, I had purchased a full box of Windsor-Newton pastels, and I wanted to use them exclusively for this painting. I had had a few in my collection before, so I had some idea of how they handle. To me, they seem to be a bit softer than Rembrandt, which until the new set arrived, made up the bulk of my pastels (along with some Senneliers, Rowney-Dalers, Grumbachers, Faber Castells, NuPastels and many brands of pencils) but harder than Sennelier. So, that being decided, the next thing I had to do was to tackle the decisions regarding paper size and type.

I have recently had some disastrous problems with a number of archival brands (which I won't specifically name, lest someone come along and cart me off to jail), so I decided to paint this on Ersta Starke (albeit reluctantly because this paper is not considered archival). I have always loved the surface and nearly all of my best works have happened on this paper. I pulled a sheet of 400 (brutal on your fingertips!) and decided on a relatively large size for me, about 16 x 21 inches. I left a half inch on all sides for ease of handling, and clipped it to a masonite board. Clips held 3 sides, and tape held the third (because a clip wouldn't reach). Having all sides secure is obviously important, but changing humidity here keeps me from taping all sides, lest it should wrinkle.

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Step 1:

I placed a horizon line in there (enhanced on these photos since you cannot see the line well in these images without enhancement). Then, using pastel pencils mostly, I began to lay in some of the cloud shapes at the top. Generally I work from top left to bottom right corners, as you can see starting here. Once I had laid in the basic cloud shapes for the top half of the sky, my impatience got the better of me, and I began to lay in the sky color with my new Windsor-Newtons!
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Step 2:

By this point, I had decided to finish off the clouds on the top layer before progressing downward, due to the complexity of the cloud layers below. I felt I needed something to work with before I got down into that section. Here you see some more of the blue sky placed in and the beginning of filling in the actual clouds at the top.

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