by Stella Coles

Created on: October 24, 2009   Last Updated: October 30, 2009

Pastels are a wonderful medium to work with, and you can achieve fantastic results. What you need to bear in mind though, is that the finished painting will need to be framed under glass for protection. That's a good thing though, because apart from protecting it, you'll be able to choose the colour of your mount and frame to fit in with your decor, whether it be period or contempory.

Before you begin your seascape, you'll need to choose a base on which to paint. You can choose pastel paper, heavy duty cartridge paper, or watercolour paper. It's also possible to buy pastel boards from art supply shops. As the consistency of pastels is crumbly, they need a paper with a grain to it which enables it to adhere to it more easily. It is possible to paint on fine sandpaper, although if you intend to, bear in mind that you will use more pastels.

Ingres paper has a stripy grain to it and Mi-tientes has a spotted effect. There are many pastel papers for sale today. They also come in various colours and this can be an advantage in that an interesting effect can be obtained by using the pastel lightly in places and leaving some of the paper to show through. Some artists prefer not to fix their paintings as the spray can tend to dull the colours. I personally do fix them because I use the pastels heavily and they do need to have some form of fixing. A hair spray works just as well as an expensive spray.

Pastels come in soft, hard and oil forms. For this article, I'll describe to you how I paint a seascape using soft and hard pastels, along with pastel pencils for outlining. First of all I gather together the colours I think I'll need and a pencil that has a rubber on the end. I choose which paper I want as the base, and then set to work. A lot of the time I prefer to use heavy-duty cartridge paper as I like to be able to put in a lot of detail, and I use the pastels quite heavily. With a very textured paper, the grain can prevent heavy use.

Take a blue pastel pencil and measuring down from the top, draw a line for the horizon. Draw an outline for anything else in the painting, such as rocks, palm trees on the beach, a ship, or mountains in the distance. Now you're ready to fill in each section.

I always start at the top of the paper and work my way down. This means that the paper is less likely to smudge. As I progress down the paper, I do tend to fix with a hair spray, which helps if there are sections which you feel need some more pastel before you're happy with it.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>