Pastel Still Life

I used pastels for the first time on this project. After doing black and white drawings all quarter it was a bit difficult to adjust to using color. For the assignment we initially had to mix all the colors using only the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and brown. At the time I was also taking a Color Theory class, so I was very confident that I knew how to mix colors. Trying to mix them with pastels, however, was a whole different story.

After doing the line drawing, the first colors added were the complementary colors of the shadows. Right off the bat we were already laying down the opposite of the color that was actually there. The next step was to layer the actual color on top. That would turn the shadow into a neutral and give the object its local color. Sounds simple...until you remember you have to use only the primary colors. That means that creating she shadows and local color actually takes three layers of color instead of just two. Another thing I had to think about was the amount of pastel I was laying on the paper. If I added too much of one color and not enough of the other then the color was off. Why not just layer some more of the other color on top? Well, if you add too many layers of pastel then they all just blend together poorly and everything gets muddy. This meant erasing back down to the paper and starting over. At this point, I was starting to wonder why anybody every uses pastels if they're so hard to work with.

In the middle of this confusing process my drawing teacher told me I was using the wrong shade of blue. This also meant erasing back down to the paper. I lost count of how many times I erased, but I actually dried out an entire kneaded eraser working on this one drawing!

By this point I was pretty frustrated and the color wheel was spinning senselessly around in my head. Using pastels was starting to become the equivalent of me trying to figure out related rates word problems in calculus class. Anyone that has heard me talk about math knows that I just can't figure out related rates no matter how long I stare at the problem. This was how I was starting to feel about using pastels. Thank goodness that the great thing about learning something new is that there comes a point where everything just clicks (...except if we're talking about related rates word problems, hasn't happened yet and probably never will). As I started to get used to how pastels worked I struggled less and less and stopped having to erase three times before getting it right. Pretty soon I had all the color laid out and just had to add the details. At the end, I spent a good amount of time staring at the two glass objects trying to get the reflections right. It turned out much better than I thought it was going to at the beginning.

So that's the end of this unusually long post. And I've decided that pastels aren't that bad after all. I hope you found it entertaining to hear the thought process behind a drawing that doesn't quite go so smoothly.