Simple Pastel Landscape Demonstration by Tony Paul

An article originally published in the December 2000 issue of Leisure Painter

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Follow Tony Paul’s guide and create a pastel landscape in four easy stages

The techniques for pastel painting involve a completely different approach to other media. The pastel sticks are rarely the right colour or tone, so making the required colour often involves overlaying different colours or tones. Much of this has to be learned by experience. The painting that I am going to demonstrate is of a meadow near the Kingcombe Centre where I teach each year. The scene appealed to me because of the feeling of strong light and shadow and the meadow grasses in the foreground.

I took a half sheet of beige Ingrès Fabriano pastel paper and clipped it to my drawing board, interposing newspaper between it and the board to create a good working surface.

My pastels are Talens Rembrandt. I use these because they are of excellent quality with a good range of colours, most of which are permanent. As each pastel stick is indicated with its permanence I can avoid buying more colours that may fade. Each colour comes in a range of tints and shades. The neat colour is always 5. Tints are colours to which white has been added – 10 is the palest while the strongest tint is 6. Shades are those which have been made darker by the addition of black – these are 4 or 3.

DEMONSTRATION

A meadow near the Kingcombe Centre in Dorset is the subject of this pastel demonstration.

I drew in the outlines of the landscape in a raw umber pastel, being careful to get the various elements in proportion and in the right places relative to one another (see blue lines).

The drawing, indicating accurately where the masses will be. Proportion is as important in landscape as it is in still life or figure work.

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I began with the sky. The right-hand side was sketched in with a phthalo blue tint 9 used on its side. A cobalt blue (ultra) tint was broken over the phthalo blue to soften its regularity. The cloud area was blocked in with deep yellow tint 9. I worked back into this with the cobalt and some white. Close to the horizon line I placed a smudge of burnt sienna tint 10.

I began the trees at the central background area with turquoise tint 8 and overlaid this with phthalo green tint 7, which I then blended in. I found this too cold and pale so I overlaid chrome green deep tint 5 and created light and shade with this and olive green tint 5. Again using these two colours, I loosely blocked in the foreground shadow.

Permanent green light tint 5 was then worked into the lit areas of the trees. The grasses of the meadow were blocked in with strokes of lemon yellow tint 7, deep yellow tint 7 and deep yellow tint 5. I wanted the sunlit grass to really glow and so kept the contrast between light and shadow strong by adding the cooler and darker bluish-green tint 7, olive tint 5 and raw umber natural shade 3. However, I then felt that the shadows in the trees looked too heavy, so I introduced light into the shaded areas with blue violet tint 7. The violet colour maintained the effect of being in shadow while enlivening it.

The main masses are blocked and tonal relationships explored. Note that the colour of the central, more distant trees is cooler than the others to help them recede. The foreground is sketched in.

I had been looking forward to the grasses and used most of the colours mentioned to put broken layer upon broken layer as an underpainting to achieve the general tonality of this area. Drawing the grasses was very enjoyable. Again, I used almost all of the sticks to draw layer over layer, varying the colours and tones as I went. It was very important to keep the foreground in strong shadow so that the light effect on the meadow remained strong. It is only because of the darker tones around them that the lighter areas appear suffused with light.

The final touches were the application of the blue violet to more areas of the painting and the addition of cooler greens in the shadow areas. Finally white pastel was used to lighten the sky around the top of the right-hand trees and to indicate as a focal point the three sheep grazing in the meadow. Once this was done, the painting was complete.

The finished painting. See how the tonal relationships give a strong feeling of light on the sunlit meadow. The three tiny sheep act as focal points.