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More Traditional News

Wonderful Artists with less 5000 pageviews.

~Scarf-girl:iconScarf-girl: reports, August 26
A list of wonderful Artists under 5000 pageviews.

Yellow Deviations Feature (Over 150 Featured)

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, August 24
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their yellow deviations and their thumbnails are posted here.

AUTOMATISM: An Overview

*gromyko:icongromyko: reports, August 20
What is automatism?

Outer Space and Planets Feature (Over 45 Featured)

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, August 19
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their space related deviations including moons, planets, stars, and suns.

Wonderful unknowns.

~Scarf-girl:iconScarf-girl: reports, August 19
(A little list of awesome artists under 4000 page views.)

Purple Deviations Feature (Over 100 Featured)

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, August 17
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their purple deviations for a feature, their thumbnails are posted in this article.

Yes. We like Traditional ART!

~ConigliettoRosa:iconConigliettoRosa: reports, August 16
For everyone who like traditional ART!!

Orange Deviations Feature (Over 250 Featured)

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, August 14
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their orange deviations and got a lot of entries for this feature. So here are their thumbnails.

This week's Traditional Anime/Manga Portraits

*Anotheroutsider:iconAnotheroutsider: reports, August 13
About one hundred of the most remarcable traditional manga/anime portraits of the last 7 days. Show some love to these great artists of dA !!!

Hidden Talent Vol. 3 - Pencil Drawings

*Sangiev:iconSangiev: reports, August 12
Another addition to the Series : Hiddent Talent. This time portraying some of the greatest drawing you shall see in this DA Community :) So enjoy the show and go give them a visit.

Traditional News This Week

Wonderful Artists with less 5000 pageviews.

~Scarf-girl:iconScarf-girl: reports, August 26
A list of wonderful Artists under 5000 pageviews.

Yellow Deviations Feature (Over 150 Featured)

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, August 24
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their yellow deviations and their thumbnails are posted here.

Orange and Blue-Complementary Colors Feature

=Holly6669666:iconHolly6669666: reports, 12h 24m ago
I posted on the forum asking people to show me their deviations that included both orange and blue, since they are complimentary colors. Their thumbnails are featured here.

FABULOUS INTERVIEW: LOUISALINGS

*Momo-PixiFrog:iconMomo-PixiFrog: reports, August 26
Louisalings is definitely one of my favorite artists here on DA. I always seem to find myself almost giddy with excitement everytime she uploads something new. So, I invite you all to see what I see. To see the love, effort, and emotion she puts in to every one of her works. And perhaps even more importantly I invite you to see a bit into the artist herself. Enjoy!

Traditional Media Club News Week 5

*traditionalmedia:icontraditionalmedia: reports, August 25
Contest and member submissions, featuring landscapes, paintings, dragons...

Please help me out by buying some commissions.

=Yasachii:iconYasachii: reports, 16h 55m ago
I am asking you all to please help me out by buying commissions from me.

New Blog Feature on creationstore Art Community

~sa-m:iconsa-m: reports, 2d 13h ago
creationstore Art Community. Now with Blog Feature. It gives you the possibility to post news, write articles and give comments. You also can add pictures.

[link]

Traditional


Step by Step Demonstration: Pastel Landscape

*robertsloan2:iconrobertsloan2: reports, September 19, 2007
To do this demonstration, you’ll need a piece of Canson Mi-Tientes “Ivy,” 8 1/2” x 11” or 9” x 12”. Ivy is in the Canson Mi-Tientes “Heritage” 25 sheet pad, an inexpensive way to get variety in Canson Mi-Tientes when I don’t want to purchase full sheets. In stores it is often available in 8 1/2” x 11” sheets individually. You will also need a pencil, a ruler, a kneaded eraser, a tortillon or stump, a damp towel, rag or washcloth and a dry one, a can of workable matte fixative and a set of assorted or Landscape soft pastels.

I am using a 15” x 16” masonite drawing board to draw on. If you have a drafting table, lap desk, table or clipboard that’ll work just as well, or use the heavy cardboard back of a drawing pad for a drawing board.

is a photo of my supplies, minus the can of matte fixative. This pastels set is the 72 color wood box Loew-Cornell set, which is available at ASW ([link]) but if $35 is a bit pricy for you, Dick Blick ([link]) has half-stick sets of 32 and 64 for $4.89 or $14.89 respectively.

Because these are the soft “chalk” pastels that come in square or round sticks and make a lot of powder, it’s good to keep a wet towel or washcloth and a dry towel or washcloth handy while working. You can use Nupastels or other medium-hard pastels for this project, even colored Conte crayons, but not all techniques will work with oil pastels.

Our photo reference is which is Stock Photo 21 by ~Macadamia-Nuts, who generously offer unrestricted use of their stock photos as references for anyone. Look through their Gallery for more inspiring stock images, the variety and quality of their photo references is great. You can also find good references for other pastel paintings at *Unrestricted-Stock in RAR packs.

Print out your reference photo or settle down at the computer with your drawing board or pad, pastels, pencil and ruler. Use your pencil and ruler to mark off a 7” x 10” drawing area on the smooth side of the paper. I do this so that my pastel art will have some border for matting, at least 1/4” on all sides.

Stage One: block in the rocks and major color areas loosely with similar colors. This is where interpretation makes a difference. Pastels won’t render all the delicate fine details of the photo, so we’re doing a very blurry rough sketch of masses of color and light. To give depth and intensity to the art, let’s make the value contrasts stronger. Exact color doesn’t matter nearly as much as the contrast between light and dark areas (values). It doesn’t matter if you go dark to light or light to dark, just get masses of color and shade in until there is a scribbly loose version of the image on your paper.

It does not need to be exact. As I work, I start making decisions about what to simplify and what to move. If the waterfall starts a little higher in the area, it does. This is my drawing, it doesn’t have to be a photo. ~Macadamia-Nuts took a wonderful photo, we just want a beautiful pastel landscape that’s half from imagination. Some details will be added in later stages. For now, let’s keep it simple.

Stage Two: Blend everything by areas of color or light and dark, using your fingers or a soft cloth. I used my fingers and wiped them on the damp washcloth between colors to avoid unwanted blending of adjacent color areas and thus mud. Except where I’ve got mud, of course, I let a little of the greens go up into the mud by doing greens first. Smudge thoroughly as this layer is like an underpainting. The thinner and smoother this layer is, the easier later layers will go over it.

Looking at this stage, some stronger darks need to be added to the left and the shape of the strong dark area on the right could be varied to make it more interesting.

Stage Three: Strengthen darks and rearrange shapes, studying the reference to correct inaccuracies or make deliberate changes. Sketch and blend, keeping color areas mostly separate but occasionally blending darks into light areas to shade them. Some of the deep shadows in the muddy spring are now smudged in horizontally and there’s variation in the shapes of the greenery. A blue-green has been introduced into the shadowed foliage of the tree at the left, and a little of it into the lower foliage at the right.

Now it’s time to stop thinking literally about color and start to create wilder blends, stronger hues than in nature. Many Impressionist pastel painters used bright hues overlaid with strong deliberate painterly strokes. The stage has been set more or less in the areas of color as they appear in the reference. Let’s start giving it some jazzy interpretations.

What are painterly strokes? Expressive, visible strokes that follow the rounded shape of the object within the painting, or follow the shape of areas instead of just being smoothed in completely or kept within the disciplined regularity of crosshatching. Overlap them. Don’t always blend, but if you don’t like an effect, blend it down again and keep working over it. The final layers will have the kind of loose scribbly strokes found in the very first layer, but overlaid on top of this blurry dramatic underlayer.

You can use workable fixative at any of these stages to preserve them, if you really like the composition. But be aware that if you do, it will be harder to change it by going over it. I’m staying loose until the painting is done. If I were to set it aside in progress, I might use workable fixative to keep it from accidental smudges until I could go back to it.

Do NOT use gloss fixative, non-workable matte fixative or clear spray paint as a “layer” fixative. This can destroy the tooth of the paper and make it impossible to put more layers of pastel on top of what you have. Check the label on your fixative can to see that it says “Matte Workable Fixative.” Sometimes it’s “fixatif” or “matt” but it will have some version of “workable” in the label if it’s the right stuff. Do not use VO5 hairspray or any spray hair product as a workable fixative.

Stage Four: I halted this with the tree on the left and the water trickles pretty much done, to show the contrast between textures. I’ve also smudged in a little more color here and there in the smooth areas as I work over them. In a piece this small, I’m less likely to do big strokes an inch long or half an inch wide, so much as to work with the edge of the stick or the corner, streaking and curving and squiggling to get the texture effects I want.

I brought vivid blues and purple-blues into the shadows. The “white” water trickles are pale gray, pale blue, pale violet and white together in loose strokes, over a smoothed area of pale blue and pale grey together curving over the lumps and buried, muddy rocks in the stream. Last, I put some of the shadow blue-violet in under the shadows under the vegetation on the right to tone the shadow area better. The distance is too short to really get extreme with aerial perspective, bluing out the farthest part of it. It looks as if in my painting, there’s a patch of sun around at the start of the stream between tall trees. Can I improve on that effect?

Stage Five: is the penultimate stage. It looked done at first glance, but part of what I do to test these is to put them on the scanner and look at them in thumbnail. Are there contrasts too strong? Yes -- that troublesome black area is back over to the right weighing down the composition. I also need some warm colors to pull the center forward, so I’m going to add some obvious wildflowers to a couple of clumps of plants that weren’t there in the reference. I’ve put the signature in, but it would look better with more of the violet-blue shadow color instead of highlight. I think softening that black bit to deep blue/violet and darkest green-grey plus adding more warmth to the center will finish it.

I do consider my signature part of the composition on anything I do, so if you do this demonstration piece -- put yours where it fits, or down where mine is in the same colors. Sometimes it can balance the entire drawing if I put it in right and choose exactly the right color and value for it. Sign boldly and treat it like any other element in your art.

is Trickling Spring, the finished Deviation. I added more color to the darks, brought in a few more flowers than I’d planned but like the effect of a woodland fantasy, and brought some branches from the right overlapping that awkward dark area. Sun and shadow areas are warmed or cooled with more yellows and violets, and I made the mud more reddish, closer to the mud in Southern states I’ve visited. Time of day, angle of light, intensity of light changed but are still plausible, and the painting looks much more three dimensional in its final version.

Pastel painting is a bold, joyous exploration. Don’t be afraid to let your strokes show, use bold value contrasts, crazy bright colors or squiggly sloppy lines, dashes and dots. Paint vigorously. Smudge loosely and go into it again. It’s your painting and it can be as prismatic and beautiful as you desire!

Devious Comments

love 0 0 joy 1 1 wow 0 0 mad 0 0 sad 0 0 fear 0 0 neutral 0 0

~NarcOfBlyx:iconNarcOfBlyx: Sep 19, 2007, 6:16:31 PM Mood: Joy
I always thought pastels were way too messy, but now I see that the blending is a virtue. I'll have to give them another day in court.

Great tutorial!
*robertsloan2:iconrobertsloan2: Sep 19, 2007, 10:29:41 PM
Thanks! I'm so glad you found it useful. I used to love the blending back when I was working on the street in New Orleans, it made shading faces so swift and gradual. I'd blend a lot or sometimes only a little.

--
Robert A. Sloan, writer and artist
Ari Cat >^..^< Professional Muse
See my eHow Tutorials!
`MinorKey:iconMinorKey: Sep 20, 2007, 4:04:59 AM
makes me want to have a go. neat. :)

--
What is written without effort is read without pleasure - Samuel Johnson.
*robertsloan2:iconrobertsloan2: Sep 20, 2007, 5:51:29 AM
Thank you! This has been the big block on my finishing my work -- doing these. You know I've been doing Street Sketching: Portraits pretty much since we met -- I finally got the step by step thing with these articles, and I'm determined that I'll get that book done!

--
Robert A. Sloan, writer and artist
Ari Cat >^..^< Professional Muse
See my eHow Tutorials!
*Mattsma:iconMattsma: Sep 22, 2007, 12:42:42 PM
This is certainly a wonderful lesson! I really enjoyed your step by step and actual REASONS for why you did things the way you did. I think I may have to try this with my cheapie pastells for my knotwork...been wanting to do them that way and you have definitely given me a foundation of understanding here.

ALL HAIL YOU!!! :hug:

--
:shamrock: Everything I have seen in life is beautiful in it's own way, even the ugly stuff :shamrock:
*skullmage550:iconskullmage550: Sep 23, 2007, 4:46:21 PM
Thanks! I am going to have to use this sometime! :D

--
My Gallery: [link]
*robertsloan2:iconrobertsloan2: Sep 24, 2007, 3:35:46 PM
Thank you! Go for it -- I can see them as an excellent coloring medium and depending on scale or what you apply them with it could be great for knotwork.

If the lines are fine, you may want to get some pointy tortillons and take up the color by scrubbing the point on the stick before applying it. This works very well for fine detail, I did a little of it on this demo but on something like knotwork I'd do a whole lot more. Also masking may help for doing smooth gradated blended backgrounds, "dry wash" technique for a background for knotwork.

I know some people also use blended pastels as underpainting before going over them with colored pencils. Generally that'd be with one layer rubbed into another and the whole thing blended very smooth, I would think. I haven't done it but I've seen some Deviations where it worked.

--
Robert A. Sloan, writer and artist
Ari Cat >^..^< Professional Muse
See my eHow Tutorials!
*robertsloan2:iconrobertsloan2: Sep 24, 2007, 3:36:05 PM
Oooh yeah! Please link me when you do, I would love to see your version of it!

--
Robert A. Sloan, writer and artist
Ari Cat >^..^< Professional Muse
See my eHow Tutorials!
*skullmage550:iconskullmage550: Sep 24, 2007, 7:03:26 PM
I will for sure. It may not be soon though. I am busy with school. I am too busy to do my own art and answer your comments. I have like 5-8 waiting. It's sad how busy I am... no free time, really.

--
My Gallery: [link]