Soft Pastels – Poppies

This week I had a little play with some soft pastels I found in the cupboard.

I began working on the background, then played around with some mid level elements and finally put in my foreground, much as I would with watercolour…

After I’d got some basic colour down I sprayed it with some fixative (you can still see a drip on the picture which hadn’t dried when I photographed it.)

Then I added more forms to my background and then put in the basics of my poppies…

Finally I worked on refining my shapes, pushing my hard edges and pushing the contrast a bit harder too. This was tricky with this set of pastels as there were only two dark colours in the whole set – brown and black. So I used these along with some blue and purple (which were, unfortunately, quite bright) to try to make some darker hues.

Here is how this adventure turned out…

I quite like the foreground elements of this picture. I think the medium forces me to be more impressionistic and loose in a natural way. It might be worth doing some more pastel drawings to develop this a bit more. I really really enjoyed doing it, mainly because it was SO messy!!! I had to keep dashing to the bathroom to wash my hands, making the sink in there look quite multicoloured! It was really good fun to do. However, looking back, the background could have done with a little more interest and colour variation. I will have to work on a way to add some more marginal interest to my backgrounds without reducing the focus on on my foreground.

Working with Pastels

For Christmas a couple of years ago I got some new pastels:

I really enjoyed using them.  I sometimes think that more messy something is to use, the more fun it is.  😀  Previously I’d used oil pastels but never soft pastels like this.  So to begin by playing around with them, and ended up making an abstract picture: