Excellent class! Thank you for your generosity in sharing your knowledge. This class was one of the most informative I’ve seen by any online teacher. You always kept my interest and I felt encouraged by what I’ve learned. I recommend your channel to my friends who are stepping into pastels. Keep on teaching, you are great at it!
Mind blown! Game changer. I would love a video about high key painting- it can be so ethereal and captivating Thank you for the lesson and I have my first set of soft pastels arriving Thursday- Sennelier Plein Air 80 half sticks. If I become a patreon will I be able to view past videos there? Thank you for sharing your art with us!
Contrast is indicative of lighting conditions. In real life there is light and dark and without shadows there is no form. There is much more contrast in the test pictures than you talk about before painting. The trees are very dark and the sky is quite light. Having little contrast is one choice of style but it may look very flat. Many people do not use enough contrast to make interesting paintings.
Well, I’m very late replying to this comment haha, but you can in fact varnish pastels with an aerosol fixative! Fixative is basically a solution of resin and alcohol that you can use either to preserve your final work OR fix a layer to the paper so that you can keep drawing on top of it without disturbing it. A lot of artists dislike fixative because of how it can change a piece’s appearance, though, so the most foolproof way to preserve your pastels is to frame it behind glass. That goes for both oil and soft pastels. If framing is too expensive or you’re working in a sketchbook and you just want a way to keep the pages from smudging, I find that taping some acid free newsprint or some other more waxy paper that won’t adhere to your drawing over the page does a decent job! That’s how I protected my charcoal and conte sketchbook assignments in my drawing class :) One last thing to consider is how soft the oil pastels you’re using are. A harder, more waxy oil pastel won’t smudge as easily, but something like Sennelier or Mungyo gallery soft oils will probably need to be framed or fixed if you want to preserve it. Personally I like working with Pentel’s 50 color set in my sketchbooks because they’re pretty waxy and don’t smudge or transfer much, even if I don’t cover it with newsprint. Obviously there are other trade-offs to using cheaper, lower grade oil pastels, but I find that it never hurts to have one of those cheaper sets in my inventory. Hope this was helpful!
