Cottage Loaf and Catkins. Pastel 20” x 15”.

In her third and final article on Pastel Solutions Charmian Edgerton produces a feast of surface detail for the pastellist.

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Pastel painters will be familiar with this particular sinking feeling … stepping back to admire the latest ‘work of art’ on the easel, there is a sickening crunch underfoot and you realise that it wasn’t the dog biscuit, but £1.30 of irreplaceable pigment.

Maddeningly fragile though these pastel chalks are, their very ‘crumbliness’ makes them a sympathetic and versatile medium. They are particularly suited to the rendering of texture, not only of subjects close to their own dry nature (dog biscuits, for example) but to cloth and fruits and flowers and other vital bits and pieces of still life.

Pastel supports

Before you start a pastel painting which will possibly involve a lot of textural work, it is important to choose the right support.

As I have mentioned in other articles, pastel chalks need a paper or board with a ‘tooth’ or an abrasive surface, otherwise the surface quickly clogs with pigment.

When painting texture, I like to work on, at the very least, a Canson Mi-Teintes board which has plenty of deep surface holes. Sandpaper would be my next choice, but my favourite support is a marble dust board. I learned this last year while involved in the production of a book (Painting in Pastels by Jenny Rodwell, Studio Vista). Acrylic gesso is mixed with marble dust and painted in thin layers on to the smooth side of a piece of hardboard.

If you wish to further experiment with an even more abrasive surface, Lascaux Plastik (acrylic gesso mixed with quartz) is worth a try, but mind your fingers and take out a mortgage on your pastels.

Experiment

Before you start your painting, I suggest that you experiment with your pastel chalks on spare paper samples.

The pastels will give you a wide range of marks and before you start on your picture it might be wise, for example, to practise overlaying colours and combining areas with dots and dashes.

Looking with a new eye

Cottage Loaf and Catkins. Pastel 20” x 15”. A surprising amount of warm violet was used in the areas of shadow and the cottage loaf was heavily underpainted in varied values of ultramarine blue and purple. In fact, if you look closely at the detail of the bread, there is still a quantity of those colours shining through the complimentary colours of the overpainting. Having glazed warm oranges, orange pinks and yellow oranges over the base coat, the surface was sprayed with fixative. Hard pastels and pastel pencils were used to ‘tease up’ the surface. A useful tip: always use pastel pencils on a lightly sprayed surface, otherwise it is easy to ‘lose’ your strokes in the softer pigment, in the detail of the catkins, yellow green, cadmium yellow and olive green were crosshatched into purple and violet to create that fluffy effect.

My little studio/front bedroom is crammed with ‘texture’ squirrelled away over the years.

Ancient sacking, a pair of old boots (found in a Dorset hedge), irresistible baskets of every shape and size, abandoned sun hats from different eras, lace from Oxfam and assorted loaves of bread from different countries. My cottage loaf is five years old!

All this precious junk vies for space around my easel and I am never short of textural inspiration for my still life paintings. It is fun searching in local markets and junk shops and it is always preferable to have paintable objects to hand rather than desperately raiding other people’s lofts for artistic inspiration.

If you learn to look at objects with a new eye the humblest of them becomes visually interesting. Take my old kitchen tea towel, for example. Who would have thought that anyone could wax lyrical over anything so mundane? I never tire of trying to catch the quality of the cloth and the way the folds catch the light as it hangs drying on the cupboard door.

Look farther in your kitchen and I am sure you will find some onions. If you look at them with your new eyes they will astound you with their whiskery roots and their iridescent, shiny skins. Their textural contrasts are a pastel painter’s delight.

I was lucky to be given this wonderful string, see below by my dear 80-year-old Pa-in-law and they arrived wrapped in that very useful, dark-toned sack that you see in the background.

Pa’s Suffolk Onions. Pastel 30” x 15”. I really enjoyed painting these onions and learnt a lot about sacking! This is, for deliberate reasons, a very ‘cool’ painting. I wanted to evoke an atmosphere of winter in the garden shed, so the colour ‘temperature’ was kept very low. The under painting was chalked in a range of cool blues with varying tones of Rowney grey browns (very useful and subtle) stroked over the top. Apart from the muted warmth of the onions, painted in a range of tones of burnt sienna and orange, the painting is practically a monochrome. No black was used.

On top of my dresser is my grandmother’s mortar (see below) in which I keep odd balls of string and wool. To anyone else, that is all it is, a bowl of odds and ends, but to you and me now string and wool are things of beauty, aren’t they?

Wool and string in mortar (detail). I used my favourite method of underpainting in colours complementary to the surface pigment. The mortar was underpainted with tones of creamy yellow ochre topped with contrasting strokes of pale blues and violets. The colour base for the wool and string was heavily crosshatched with the appropriate complementaries of blues and browns, with further textural highlighting in the palest of yellows and violets. Tempting though it was, I used no white chalk.

Take a last look in your kitchen cupboard and then have a glance at the painting below.

In my cupboard, I have stored all the kitchen things that we use unthinkingly every day – wooden spoons, garlic, baskets, pots of jam and pickled onions.

Take note of the textural difference between glass and garlic and cloth and wood etc. It is an important point to remember.

Having rather grandly shown you around my kitchen, I have to admit, shamefacedly, to having borrowed the preserves from a kindly neighbour.

Figure 4 The September Kitchen. Pastel 32” x 38”. I love September with all the connotations of fruit picking and jam making as long as someone else does it! I particularly love painting that season’s rich colours and hopefully I managed to catch a little of that atmosphere in my cupboard. The painting was approached in my usual way: lots of cool blues and some green browns, where appropriate, with warm siennas, oranges, and browns overlaid. The bright, shiny scarlet chillies were deliberately chosen for their colour to lead the eye in to the centre of the cupboard. A useful tip to remember is the juxtaposition of rough and smooth objects within the painting, i.e. the ‘crisp’ garlic bulbs are placed against the shiny glass. In the details of the tea towel, you can see that I really explored the texture of my favourite tea towel.

Detail from The September Kitchen

Keeping a balance

Let us now wander down the High Street. Just a quick glance around the greengrocers and you will be rewarded with a visual feast. No artist could resist the colour and textural contrast of those shiny scarlet peppers piled against green crinkly cabbage. Look at the Jersey potatoes piled dustily in their sagging sacks. Their very dustiness echoes the nature of brown pastel pigment.

Before going back to the studio I want to pop into the bakers. Isn’t it wonderful in here? A haven of texture for the pastel painter. Look at all those gorgeous crusts, those golden croissants, those poppyseed loaves. I can see, you too, have been bitten by the ‘texture bug’ and... no we are not exploring Oxfam today, we have work to do.

I think you will agree that in the hands of the artist things of everyday use can become objects of beauty and excitement.

Setting up a still life

Cottage Loaf (detail)

Now we come to the setting up of our still life. Though we have a myriad of objects from which to choose we shall keep it as simple as possible.

It is a good idea to have a balance of rough and smooth so that areas of blended pastel are juxtaposed with, for example, areas of ‘scumbling’.

I suggest that you might like to follow my example and start by choosing a crusty loaf.

As a pleasant contrast to the crustiness, how about some eggs in a basket on a wooden board or the kitchen table. A check cloth or tea towel in green or blue would add a delightful bit of complementary colour to all the different shades of brown.

Paint that successfully and I know that Chardin and Bonnard would be proud of you.

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Further reading from this series:

Click here to read part 1 of Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions

Click here to read part 2 of Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions