A lot of people have asked me to teach them how to work with soft pastels the way I do. I manage to create a solid, powerful picture with a medium as gentle and pale as soft pastels. All it takes is a steady hand and a little courage. You shouldn't be afraid of the medium. There's nothing to be afraid of, just practice. It took me about two drawings to get the hang of it. This doesn't mean the first two pictures were failures: they were not. The first took me a whole lot longer to create than I wanted to and the second didn't have nearly as much detail as I had wanted to. I'll show you what I'm talking about with pictures I did a year ago as I got back in touch with the medium after having left it alone to deteriorate for four or five years. As some people would say: if you don't use it, you lose it. And they were right. I had lost the ability to work with pastel whereas before I had created beautiful pictures with the medium (an excerpt of one of those older pictures can be seen along this tutorial and was part of a big commission, hence the detail). Below you can see the pictures I meant. The left one took five hours (that's long, mind you) and the one to the right took one hour (and turned out a little plain). The picture on the left was combined with regular pencils to make up for the pale look.
And I know you didn't get here to learn how to do that. You are here to learn how to make a soft pastel picture blow off the paper. How to make the sky a powerful blue, and the leaves a powerful green. Normally, people would advize you to use a different medium, different kind of colouring pencils. I however, will not. Once you get the hang of this medium, you'll love it to create beautiful coloured pieces with a speed and subtlety that's unheard of.
You got here to do this, didn't you?
The horse pictures took two to three hours each. The wolf pictures took five hours. But you did come here to learn how to do that, didn't you? Well then, let's get down to business!
Teach Me!
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