Refining Shapes with Pastel – process insight
Information! Process! Pastels!
Here’s my impersonation of someone trying to start something cool. I thought it’d be a good idea to have a TAD student tutorial blog.
I definitely learn the most when I know what I should be thinking about, or the specific benefits of a medium/approach.
There’s so much subtext in one person’s particular process that it may help to hear how other students approached a piece, or thought about when executing their particular process. The ‘why’s as well as the ‘how’s. These tutorials would be less of a demonstration, but more a singling out one particular process point and elaborating on why they made a choice which applies to the whole image.
I made a tutorial to elaborate on this (click to view larger):
The main point of this tutorial is to treat pastels like a painting medium. As long as the paper isn’t overloaded with pastel they can be applied very opaquely. This leads to a technique I adopted years ago after looking at concept artists that paint on a single layer, and ofcourse it’s also true for painters with opaque mediums. To adjust a shape involves painting adjacent colours over one another until the edge is in the right place. This idea translates to working with pastels, and I think when I realised it was about painting and not drawing was when it made sense. I see a handful of students trying this for the first time by drawing the silhouette then working inwards. This is the kind of tutorial I thought would help address that approach.
