WELCOME to the HOW-TO section of Pastel-Portraits.com. In these pages, I give you tips to start making your own portraits in soft pastel. This tuturial is not intend to teach you how to draw, it is just free demonstration of my own technique. To use it, you are supposed to know the drawing basics, or better, to be an already pastel painter.
LESSON 1 : Portrait of Robert De Niro This is a step by step demonstration of my personal progression in the making of a portrait from a photograph.
-NEW- LESSON 2 : How to paint a Dog in 25 Steps A demonstration in PDF format - NEW-
Commercials Pastels or Home made Pastels
I use to work on a grey or beige velour paper that is easy to find on Art supplies stores. You'll find some address on my Site's linkspage. Most of the major brand will suit.Velour is great to keep colors bright.The colors I use are a personal set of home made pastels. I needed to create this set for several reasons:.
- 1) Along the years I had always the problem to find the right colors in different stores at different places because I use to move a lot for my commissioned portraits. Since I used always the same colors, they became quickly on order and sometimes I had to visit all the Art stores around to pick the last availables main colors I needed. If you live in a small town and have only one Art store where to find some pastels, you can be quickly in trouble.
- 2) With oil paints, you mix the colors on the palette, with pastels, If you don't have the right color, you'll have to recombine it on the paper wich can be challenging especially if you work live with people around, and it is a waste of time. For me, looking after my colors in a live session would be a loss of concentration and spontaneity. On the other hand, It is very expensive to get a complet set of pastels.
- 3) I was fade up to deal with brand new sticks that fall in pieces once removed from their protective paper making them unusuable for painting middle an big areas. Very often I had to use them anyway because I didn't have many sticks of the same color for a session. Once back home, I had to crush the small pieces with water to model a new stick. Another problem when working with pastels is the hardness of some colors. They are just unusuable on velour, I think of some Reds, Yellows, blues. Sennelier and Schminke pastels have the softest pastels in these colors. Just beware before buying. Take a piece of velour paper with you and try every single color on it.
- 4) By working with the exact color, I avoid to superimpose to much colors on the paper and thus avoid an overthickness of pigment impossible to fix completely.
My personnal set covers 90% of my needs. I keep using Rembrandt's black to add some very dark point when needed and some Fabercastel pastels for small details, they are hard enought to be sharpened and work well on velour. For the sketches, I use the Sepia hell/light lead from Koh-I-Noor. Any other can suit if it is soft enough and can be sharpen (Fabercastel or Conte ). For thin black strokes, the Conte Pierre Noire is just perfect.
More about my Pastels
Most of the portraits in my galleries are from Sitting and were done in about 30 to 45 minutes. This is the time I usually need to complete a live portrait. This speed is due in part to the perfect knowledge of my palette.
Like the most famous brand, they are made from the purest pigments mixed with the finest quality kaolin. They have a very high degree of lightfastness and purity. Although you can use them on any pastel paper, they are optimized to be used on velour paper. They slide better, they are just soft enough, they don't break easily, and they have the right surface coverage on velour wich means you can superimpose colors very easily, obtain nice gradients with no unwanted strokes in big areas. Schminke and Sennelier are excellent pastels, but working in half transparency with them, for exemple, is difficult since they saturate the velour at the first stroke due to their extreme softness. Using such very soft pastels for the first layer of your portrait will leave your work very fragile and easy to smudge. They are more suitable for strong points of color on small areas. Since details need harder pastels, It is very difficult and not recommended to work details on saturated paper.
The main difference that makes this system so attractive is that I don't stock my pastel in sticks, but in a ready to model mixture. I just have to add water and that is it. I can model pastels the size I want .No hassles with gum ratio, I get each time the perfect softness.