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Do you think a pastel painter needs thousands of pastel sticks to be able to paint? Not entirely so.

 

Recently I took up a challenge to paint with 12 colours plus black and white, and someone commented that it looked very much like my usual painting style, so where was the challenge?

 

Hm, yes, that was after all basically true.

 

The Challenger had painted with only three colours (+ black and white), so I took him up on that.

 

Don't tell him, but I did choose to design the scene so it would fit the very limited number of colours...

 

As I worked on a fairly darkish paper, I knew I would get better results with toning the light areas with white before starting. And then I chose black to darken the dark areas. The black and white underpainting makes a huge difference. It (the finished sketch) would have been more colourful if I had used the colours for the underpainting. But I prefer to have whites and blacks under the colours.

 

 

The turning fish is my chosen area of interest. But it doesn't stand (swim!) as an isolated blob in the midst of darkness. I have hinted at things growing, and things being reflected in the surface, so there is a visual path, a movement, combining the fish and the other light elements in the painting.

 

Now, why do people maintain that a pastel painter really needs thousands of sticks?

 

I have two theories about that: a) people think it is easier to search for just the right stick of just the right nuance, and b) if one starts painting with pastels, one has not learned to mix colour in a wet medium.

 

My personal answer to a) is that it can be quicker to modify the colour you have with another colour, and it is easier to carry a more limited palette. To b) I suggest some serious work mixing colours and learning how they behave. I started painting in oils, and did extensive studies of colour mixing. There are no quick fixes, knowledge must be earned by hard work.

 

So three colours work for pastel painters too. Admittedly, it isn't easy, but that palette of 14 sticks in the previous blog post are quite enough. OK, I'd like to expand on that, a little bit, for convenience's sake. But still, some 30 sticks are nowhere near the two thousand some recommend.

 

Good news! Sketches and studies -- and experiments -- have a new section on my website, and they are half the price of finished paintings!

 

Another pastel painter Michael Chesley Johnson has this idea about only using twelve colours (a warm and a cool of the primaries and secondaries) plus black and white, a total of 14 sticks. As I maintain that a huge palette isn't needed, I took him up on the challenge.

I chose a scene from the Old Town of Stockholm, Sweden. This is the 'backyard' of the cathedral, and the building hited at in the opening of the wall is the royal palace. The Old Town, Gamla Stan,

As I don't have the same brand, I picked colours that were similar. I made three changes:
1) I chose charcoal instead of a black stick, because it is a softer and warmer black that goes extremely well with pastels, and I can feather an area slightly darker.
2) I chose a lighter value warm blue, so it could be used for the sky and for shaping volume in shadowed floliage, and work as a cooling agent for foliage in light.
3) My 'white' is a warm peachy yellowy almost white, as I would use it mostly in sunlit areas.

Then, I found out that if I wanted to darken a fairly light area, it worked really well to smear some pastel on my finger and gently blend it in, while using a darker pastel directly on the painting tended to get too 'brutal' for the very small amounts of pigments needed for darkening the lights.

A reason for the "finger painting" is that the sticks I chose are much softer than Michael's, and thus release more pigment.

Mostly I used colour to darken colour, but the charcoal is definitely in the sketch. I put black into the very first layer, where I needed the deeper darks. As I want the luminosity of colour, I prefer to put colour over black when possible, rather than mix black into colour.

Same goes for lightening darks with white. I used the finger trick, but mostly I lightened with lighter colour. In order to lighten an orange, I can only choose a yellow or a white to do the job. And I know the white will also cool the area, and the yellow will also brigthen (in addition to lightening) so depending on what I need/want, I choose one of them.

Somebody asked me if I was happy with the painting. Yes, I am. This limited palette worked much better than I thought it would. With harder sticks than Unisons, it would be even easier to modify the colours.