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!