Painting with Pastels

Being someone who dabbled in Airbrushing, Inkwash, and Acrylics in his younger years, I’ve discovered that some of the concepts apply to what I call “Painting with Pastels”.

With Airbrushing, you get used to having to mask off everything that you don’t want painted.

With Inkwash, you begin to understand the actual value of the color is dependant on how much ink you use.

Acrylics are vibrant by themselves and must be toned down for some applications even.

The concept of “Painting with Pastels” is really a take of working with inkwash. You can build backgrounds very easily with soft pastels because of the way that the colors blend easily, making it a very loose medium with vibrancy that can be attained easily but also easy to tone down.

I recently purchased a set of acrylic brushes specifically for working with pastel. This is for blending the pastel as well as applying it. Take for example the easy cloud technique you can achieve with airbrushing. A ripped sheet of paper can make a mask that you can use for clouds. This same type of technique can now be applied to pastels in the same way by using brushes across this.

As for how this applies to Acrylics and even watercolor, I can now apply the same painting technique anywhere without the need for water to rinse my brushes in. I now have a completely portable medium that is just as vibrant and with only half the cost of paints. The look is a lot more like watercolor or inkwash when finished. I will post a “painting” here soon to show the technique but for an example of my first experiment into this technique, see my entry for the Chewing Pencils cartoon contest in which the colors were accomplished this way.

Tags: art, art project, arts, drawing, inkwash, interactive, masking, paint, pastel, project, watercolor