I love trying new mediums

After a slow, quiet start to the week (at least as far as art is concerned) the last few days have seen a couple of pleasurable forays into new mediums for me.

On Thursday afternoon I attended a pastels workshop at the local community centre. There has been an art group that meet each week for some time but periodically, at the moment, paid classes are also available. I say paid but it only cost £4 and for that I could've used all of the tutors materials for the full two hours of the session. I didn't, I took my own cheapo soft pastels that I picked up somewhere, in a sale no doubt, but I did use the paper, pencils, putty and fixative spray that were available.

Boat on a beach

She started us off with a step by step exercise to get used to using the pastels - The output of which is the dark and moody 'boat on a beach' picture you can see. I was pleasantly surprised with the ease with which this came together - I think we worked on it for 30 minutes, that's all. The other surprise was that we painted onto cheap brown paper and I think it's this fact that meant the result had a dark and moody feel to it, but perhaps the medium itself also influenced that.

Lake Garda Sunset

Once this was completed we were free to paint our own picture. I had taken a couple of photos from our spring trip to Europe, both of Lake Garda - a stormy evening sea and a stunning sunset sea. As you can see I chose to do the sunset. I picked up a pale buff coloured paper and this time I blended the pastels into the paper much more. I think this is just more me because I like neat and tidy, I'm not good with giving the impression of something on paper, I really struggle to paint loosely.

The two paintings do demonstrate two very different methods of using pastels. I actually like them both.

And so yesterday I decided to play with pastels again, I wanted to try the boat on white paper to see how much of a difference the paper made. I learnt a few things:-

Never repeat a painting I am almost happy with, invariably I cannot do it as well as I did the first time.
The lighter paper does make it lighter overall.
Boats should look like boats and not bathtubs tied up on a beach!
When the paper is smaller than your original, don't make the boat bigger 🤷

I'm sure there are a number of others but I won't bore you further. Oh and the photo attached had the most flattering angle so that's all I'm sharing. Have a good weekend all. Wendy xx

Paper comparison

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