Painting with Water and Soft Pastel - Estaing, Gorge Du Lot - France

Painting with Water and Soft Pastel – Estaing, Gorge Du Lot – France

Pastels are made from similar materials to watercolour, with pure pigment except not quite so fine, and also bound together with gum Arabic. If you have a lot of bits of old pastel, or even dust from the box, you may mix them into a paste with water, et voila – when dry you have new pastel!! It is as simple as that. So it should not surprise you when I say that you can literally paint with soft pastels and water! You can stretch pastel paper wet, as with water colour paper, also. I like using watercolor paper with pastel and either coat it with a dark wash of acrylic ink or even thin coat of acrylic paint. Arches hot-pressed 140 lb takes the pastel very well this way and for snow scenes Waterford not 140 lb is great, as it gives additional texture. For painting pastel with water, either will do and in the first case, for the sunflowers, I use smooth hot pressed, but for the main work here, the gorge, I use not. Simply stretching the paper with masking tape will be fine as it will soon dry out and be flat again.

The pastels I favour most are the Unison range, handmade in Yorkshire, England. My first example of using water for you was a rather unusual and exciting evening in the Hebrides, Scotland! I was attempting to paint and film an oil of a river, but the rain suddenly arrived and almost instantly the river was in spate (flooding)! You can see the difference in the shot below left.

As the paper, and I , were already soaked I simply had to add and blend the pastel over it with my oval mop. It was still possible to add further coats and details over them afterwards.

As the river rose I as able to paint “hands on” using my brush and fingers to manipulate the pastel. Adding more water as required, even though it was still pouring down! Great fun and very expressive, which linked well with the subject as the river increased its velocity!

The painting not a delicate fine photographic piece, but eventually reflected the raw power of the day and scene. Next a totally different subject and starting with water and acrylic inks dropping wet-into-wet and then allowing the colours to flow. Working over those with pastels at the end, both directly and painting plus blending some parts in with water and a brush.

After a wash of clean water, keep the surface wet as you work, by using a spray diffuser.

Once you get your desired background affects, you can work over it and tighten it up as far as you wish. Quite often the loose work in itself requires no further progress at all.

Now let’s move onto the final work, the large landscape of the Gorge Du Lot, with Estaing in the distance?

Very little foreground and a lovely series of planes gradually vanishing back into the distance and horizon. A nice example of aerial perspective rather than linear? Firstly I wet the 140 lb not paper and scumbled a grey blue pastel over the surface. I always remove all of the pastel paper casings before using them, or you are tempted to work with the tips only and need to be free to use the sides also.

As you see, it was a lovely day and a great place to be, let alone paint! I had my larger portable easel as it was a full sheet of paper on a large board!

I had already drawn out the basic composition and so applied the water and pastel washing it across as I went along.

This coat dries very quickly under such conditions and although darker than true colour when wet soon becomes light again and normal. I was then able to immediately add colours over the surfaces. Remember that wet pastel dries fixed, and is in fact easier to add subsequent coats!

By scumbling pastel over the surface we can get a broken colour effect and gain vibrance also, using the paper texture to do so. Then I continue making washes of the distant hills.

Working from the background gradually forward I increase the warms in my colours, and also detail.

The technique is to do background under painting of blues and purples then add the greens over the top.

Then warmer greens and browns are added progressively into the foreground, as well as greater detail.

Final browns, reds, and oranges complete the foreground and our painting.