My Pastel Painting of my cat Solomon taught me something about pastel ground and PanPastels. I wanted to try Goldens Acrylic Ground for Pastels on a foam core board. I did it wrong put plowed ahead anyway. I applied the pastel ground with a coarse brush strait out of the jar. (later found out I should thin it first and/or use a soft brush and add a couple of coats). The result was a corrugated texture which showed up disastrously each pastel stroke. See the zoomed image. The solution was to use PanPastels with foam applicators. The foam applicators pushed a thin film of pastel into the grooves and on top of the ridges uniformly. This made the undesired texture almost invisible. The highlights sparsely applied with soft pastel still show the corrugation, but the result was still good. I had purchased the PanPastels originally to apply a thin underpainting. In this painting I did 95% of the painting with the foam applicators. In addition I used pastel sticks for highlights and pastel pencils for facial details. I found I could even use my soft pastels with the foam applicators. In some places I sumbled passages with soft pastel sticks and blended the results with the foam applicators. I even picked up paint from soft pastel sicks with a foam applicator and applied that to the picture. This experience taught me how not to apply pastel ground, but also showed how to overcome a problem with unwanted texture. More importantly, I learned that I liked painting with foam applicators using PanPastels and soft pastels for pigments. I am also inspired to try preparing a surface with intentional texture marks made with sponges, combs, brush strokes, et. cetera.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 23:26:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015