Email: gainor@tampbay.rr.com 813 469-1641 website: www.gainor.biz

PASTEL

PAINTING AND DRAWING

by

Orange Peeled Pastel on Art Spectrum Paper 7 x 11

The progression of a pastel painting

George Somewhere the Sun is Shining

Belle Reverie Ybor City Bench

Birds in Flight Love and Kisses

Pastel papers are usually tinted. They come in a wide variety of surface textures and values and colors from pale to very dark and even black. It is very difficult to work on white, and takes a lot of pastel pigment to cover the paper. Many artists use the paper to represent the middle tone of a pastel and leave the paper unworked, as I have in this demonstration. In the beginning I thought I was going to work the background, leaving part of the dark grey paper showing, but in my first attempt at this pastel it looked overworked and so when I did it a sec-ond time I decided to leave the background out completely. I set the plate with the oranges up on a black paper in front of a window so it had that charcoal grey appearance. It does not matter what color you chose for the initial drawing. I wanted to make sure I could see it easily so I picked white, and I started with a pastel pencil. Your thinking should be about composition, and where the matte and frame come. Pastels should be mounted under glass, separated from the artwork by glass or plastic glazing. If an object comes too close to the edge you need to remember that the matte usually comes over the paper by one eighth or one quarter inch and cutting off something in your painting can be very annoying if an object is cut off by the edge of the matte.

THE START

Select the paper type and color

Focus on composition and placement on the paper

1

ESTABLISH THE LIGHTS

Most all artwork is easier to work and more “controllable” if values are carefully considered throughout the process. It is also easier to mange if the whole piece is worked over, concen-trating on the masses, the large areas of lights and darks, and the details considered last. Some people work from top to bottom, or left to right, which is OK if you can do it successful-ly, but most artists I know have more reliable results when a piece is worked from the lights first, then the darks, and finally the middle values, if the medium is pastel. I do the opposite on a white canvas or paper, establishing the darks first, then the middle values, leaving the white of the canvas to represent the highest lights. Check the way the lights fall on the subject. I usually draw in the shapes of the lights and darks, squinting to find the masses, and ignoring the fuzzy edges where the light and shadow merge into each other. Details like this can be attacked at the end. Keep your fingers off the pastel! Very soon, you will see that your fingers are a muddy mess of colors, and this will cause a muddy mess on your pastel as well, and it is worth mentioning how sore your finger may become on a sanded paper! Blending may be done by a variety of means, the best is to use the pastel itself working for a “blended” appearance by softening edges using the pigments to blend into each other. A soft brush may be used to pull the edges together, but make sure that it is well cleaned between uses! Some pastel artists use a paper stick, called variously, a “stump”, a “blending stick”, or “tortillon”. With one of these you can peel off the outer layer of the paper to expose a clean working surface. I never use one of these, but some artists love them.

2

CONSTRUCTING THE FORMS

My artwork is based on a very sturdy “construction” of the shape of objects in my paintings. This gives a foundation, on which later layers may be built. If the darks are mi-grating into the lights a light spray of fixative may be added. At this point I am concen-trating on the construction which loosely may be called “drawing”. I have strengthened the edges of the plate, and concentrated on the various planes of the left orange to give myself a road map that makes it easy to layer in the pigments. I find that I have not drawn the plate correctly initially and work to get the shape of the plate right. I begin to loosely add color here and there, wherever my eye is drawn. I’m al-ways judging one value to the next, comparing it to the background, or value of the paper and to the lights that I have established.

3

LAYERING THE PIGMENTS

What makes a pastel a challenge for most of us is that you have an arbitrary color and val-ue represented in the pastel stick itself. If it is too light or too dark another color and value may be worked over the original. This can be both exciting and frustrating! Some pastel artists want thousands of sticks of pastels to get the right color in the right value, and use only that one. I prefer to mix my pastels right on the paper. This approach allows you to have fewer pastels to choose from, as well as an exciting luminous appearance of colors and values mixing in layers. It can also create a muddy mess if the pigment is applied too thickly at this point. Sometimes I snap my fingers on the surface of the paper to knock off the loose pigments. Here I have added more interest to the blue plate, adding pale pigments which in the end will be reworked with other shades of blue to become less bright.

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6

BACK TO THE DRAWING

….and checking the negative spaces

Some people find pastel frustrating because it is difficult to keep everything going at once.

When values and color are adjusted the drawing gets fuzzy. I’m still fussing about that blue

plate. It seems a little crooked to me. I get up and move around the room to view it from a

distance to see where I’m headed on this. I am aware that some of the shapes and forms

of the orange and the spiral peel need to be strengthened, which I can do by concentrating

on the edges and refining them with either a tone to represent the actual edge or looking

at the negative spaces next to the edge or shape to reinforce the value to define the object

itself. If you learn how to do this, and it becomes second nature, you will find it a very

powerful tool when creating any artwork.

WORKING INTO THE DETAILS

I have been conscious of the reflections on the plate from the very beginning. In fact this is one of the things that have attracted my interest the most. I have purposely not become in-volved in those details until the end. Focusing too much attention on those details in the be-ginning is really a waste of time, as they will most likely have to be worked and reworked to appear in the correct value. Reflections are tricky because our mind tells us that they are ei-ther brighter or darker than they really are. It is much easier to get them right at the end, when the values of everything else have been established. I can add the wiggly reflections now by simply drawing over what is there and adding some pigment to give some life to the plate in that section. Now that I have the drawing and values so they work without calling too much attention to themselves I can add rich pigments to those places on the orange and plate that electrify the colors. Rich blues and strong oranges are added and evaluated to make sure they are not out of value and that they add excitement but don’t throw the object out of value.

7

8

FINISHING UP

I’m still not sure about the plate edges and so I’ve redrawn them trying to smooth out those edges. Drawing the ellipse is about the most difficult exercise in drawing without using me-chanical aids, but resorting to that will often make a drawing look contrived. I’m satisfied now with how it looks, and so I can begin to refine everything, pulling the lights up, adding more color in the darks, and working the cast shadow more so the plate seems anchored to the table. I need to use my kneaded eraser to get some stray marks off the paper. Some-times I leave these marks if they don’t call attention to themselves. There is no shame in letting people know how hard it is to get those edges, but in this case I decide that they are out of value and the edges of the plate need to be cleaned up a bit. A flick or two of light pigment on the top of the orange and my work is finished. How do I know when it is done? As a beginner it was easy to know when to stop; at the moment when I didn’t know what to do next was the moment to stop working on it. It is a good rule of thumb. Now that I have 50 years of painting history behind me it is very easy for me to overwork my paintings, and I must remind myself that I want it to appear spontaneous. Once overworked it can not be made to appear spontaneous, so it is better to quit while the work has “imperfections” than try to make it perfect!

RECOMMENDED SUPPLIES 1. Papers a. Canson Mi-Tientes b. Art Spectrum c. Wallis d. LaCarte These are the 4 types of paper I use the most often. There are other types of pastel papers, including “velvet” which is a flocked paper that comes most often in black. It used to be very popular for subjects like sunsets and Elvis Presley portraits. 2. Pastel sets a. Rembrandt b. Sennelier c. Unison Most of the major paint manufacturers have a line of pastels that would be fine under most circum-stances. My favorites are listed above. The Rembrandt half stick assortment is about all anyone really needs to create a luminous and fine pastel work of art and the price is very moderate. I have two boxes of Sennelier pastels, always considered top of the heap, which I use at the end, especially in the lighter colors, due their softness and powdery quality. Unison Pastels are quickly becoming my all time favorite, but price is a factor here and so I use them sparingly. 3. Pencils a. Derwent b. Conte c. Brynyzeel Most any pastel pencil will give you what you need. They are very handy to have but not necessary for pastel paintings, but quite indispensable when making pastel portraits. Those little details around the eyes are hard to do with a fat pastel stick. Many art stores sell pastel pencils individually and so a collection may be made up by buying one or two at a time. 4. Fixative a. Lascaux To spray or not to spray! It will change the appearance of the pastel if it is sprayed! Lascaux will change the appearance the least amount of all that I have tried. Sometimes pastels mounted un-der glass will get a positive and negative ion charge and static electricity will cause the pastel pigment to lift off the paper and attach to the inside of the glass. Sometimes thickly worked pastels will fall onto the lower edge of the matte causing the white bevel of the matte to turn a dirty dark color. My rule is to spray if the pas-tel is thick and juicy, and not spray if it is worked thinly. I only use Lascaux and sometimes I spray and then re-work the lights at the end to punch them up again. Ask your framer to use a mat that has a spacer attached to the back so the pastel dust will fall between the mat and the artwork. Lastly, I have found that acrylic plastic glazing that has been cleaned with anti-static cleaner has always been fine for my pastels. 5. Accessories a. drawing board or support (a piece of foam board works well for this) b. tape (artist tape that can be easily removed is the better choice, but masking tape will work too) c. kneaded eraser (press it onto the artwork, don’t scrub) d. pencil sharpener (very handy if you use pencils a lot, but the blades must be sharp! Do not try to use an electric or hand crank sharpener, it will shred the pastel pencils.) You will have more success with an X-acto knife, however, if the pencil has been dropped you will find that it is very difficult to sharpen it until you are past the broken pastel inside the wooden casing.

Art has been a passion with Gainor for most of her life, and she

can remember drawing pictures as a toddler and sometimes she

would feign illness to stay home from school and draw pictures all

day. In spite of her academic nonchalance she managed to com-

plete college with a BA degree in English. But painting continues

to be a passion and has been her main occupation even though

she has had many jobs allied with the graphic arts and printing in-

dustries.

She considers herself a realist painter and has been greatly influenced by the Impres-

sionists. She studied painting at the Art Students’ League, in New York, with Robert

Brackman and later at the National Academy of Design and Lyme Academy of Fine

arts, studying painting, drawing and sculpture. Her paintings are characterized by her

love affair with color and design, and she frequently uses fruits and vegetables as

subject matter, although she loves to paint a wide variety of subject matter, including

portraits of people and animals.

Her mediums are oil, watercolor, pastel, egg tempera, a variety of drawing media and

monotype. Her love of art is reflected by a love of traditional artist materials and tech-

niques although she is familiar with and has great affection for many contemporary

artists and their mediums. Her subjects are still life, landscape, symbolic still life paint-

ings, and portraits. She conducts classes and workshops in painting and drawing. She

sometimes works with students privately as well. She has exhibited her work widely in

New England and more recently in the Tampa Bay area and has had several solo

shows, including a 50-year Retrospective of her work in the fall of 2005 at Horizon

Line Gallery in Temple Terrace.

She is a member of many art organizations including the Egg Tempera Society, The

Exhibiting Society of Artists, (TESA), Monotype Guild of New England (honorary

member), and The National League of American Pen Women (artist member).