You Can Draw!

If a man therefore purge himself from these,
he shall be a vessel unto honour,
sanctified, and meet for the master's use,
and prepared unto every good work.

- 2 Timothy 5: 21

Lesson Three  Painting with Pastel

Beginning

This was how I began to learn to paint with pastel:

I was learning oil painting then in a painting studio. I felt it very difficult, every time I took up the brush I felt I was going to make mistakes either in colors or in something else, and I did. In the end I got so frustrated and discouraged that I had to leave there. Then one day I saw some pastel sketches of an oil artist on the internet. Though they were sketchy, they were beautiful in colors and looked simple. I thought in my heart, maybe I could learn to paint with pastel first.

So I began to imitate some nice pictures with pastel and enjoyed it very much. I drawed on big sketch paper, after finish "laminated" them with adhesive tape and sticked them on the doors and walls at home, which looked very nice.

Thus after some time, when I picked up oil painting again, I felt it much easier to learn and improved a lot.

Learning Points

Like drawing with colored pencils, we can start with pastel by imitation. All we need are a box of 24 or 36-colored pastel, some sketch paper and a drawing board to support the paper.

We can spray a fixing liquid on the surface of the painting after we finish it. It could add more fun to make the paintings into wall pictures, calendars, handbags and other such things.

Would you like to have a try and imitate these pictures?

Sketching with Pastel

After imitating at home for some days and getting familiar with the qualities and colors of pastel, I went out to sketch. In a fine day,  what pleasure and fun it is to take a box of pastel, carry a drawing board, and go out to sketch,!

Here are some of the sketches I made with pastel.

Do you like them?

Further Study

Compared with Colored pencils, pastel are better to make bigger, more vivid and colorful pictures. As pastel are convenient to carry, and have a great variety of colors to use, many artists like to use them to do sketching before creating oil paintings. And because they are so expressive and the colors are hard to come off, many artists switched to them completely, using them to create original paintings. They formed the unique and charming pastel art.

As I learned pastel painting by myself at first, my experiences were very simple and crude. Later I found in a bookstore some good book and VCD tutorial, from them I learned there were some better skills and knacks, and what beautiful paintings pastel can make.

These are the book and VCD tutorial that I've found very helpful:

Book: Creative Painting with Pastel ( Author: Carole Katchen )

VCD Tutorial: Pastel Skills ( Published and distributed by Liaoning Broadcast TV Audio and Video Publishing House  ISRC CN-D14-03-0020-0/V.Z(3) )

Hope they may be of some help to you too!

Some Artists' Pastel Paintings