Chile in pastel

medium - not hue, that is... distinctly too high in chroma to pass as pastelly sketches.

These are the plein air sketches (well: bar the two nocturnes which were done from memory).



Today's work again - I'm far too tired for 9.30 and it's bitter cold here, still: half of Glasgow is dressed exactly the same way as people in Santiago were, or even more summerly: bare tops, flipflops and plenty of blue skin on show - and that with about 15C difference in temperature. Nonetheless: my clothes drying quickly tells me that it must be fairly warm here too (the show of flipflops in Glasgow rarely indicates anything useful on my personal temperature gauge, I've found over the years).

The next week's will be busy - with work, but also with preparations for our next group exhibition - with the opening on 20 May. So, I figure: I won't drag Chile out too much longer, because I don't know what else will happen over the next four weeks. Thus: the whole lot of pastel sketches in one go. Here's the pastel kit I used - or rather: what's left of them.

The bull's hollow in live

Water reflections #1
Soft pastel on board, 35x25cm

On the first morning at my parents' at breakfast,

I to my brother: 'Torben, do you want to come to the bull's hollow with me?'
My mum [alarmed]: 'Oh dear, what do you want to do there?'
Torben: 'Paint it... because it's so spooky' [makes funny noise].

And he guessed without reading my earlier post.

We didn't make it that day.

Morning 2 when I get downstairs for breakfast:
My mum: 'Karsten [my dad] already wanted to go with you to the bull's hollow so that you can paint, but you've slept too long.'

So, that afternoon, all four of us go. My mum rather keen to avoid the hollow [because it's so spooky (makes funny noise)], but in the end, they leave me there and go for a walk and I for a paint.

Here's some prep sketches and one of pastels of the lochan at the bottom of the hollow. It was so still that you couldn't tell what was the reflection and what the birch trees.

Bullenkuhle, study 1
pen, ink and neo ii in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Bullenkuhle, study 3
graphite in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Hm... I hadn't used the water soluble graphite for some time, but I do like it a lot;
and: these are trees I do like, too
(well, at least the birch, the junipers are a bit rough and ready, I admit)
... much more than symbolic ones.

There's a twin post with another pastel across at Watermarks on this... here

Compositional struggles

On-site sketch, Maktesh HaGadol,
W/C on Moleskine
24x21 cm

Yesterday's desert landscape has been the latest in a long series of attempts of grappling with one scene from my Spring holiday to the Negev.

Following on from several on site sketches, pastel sketches, some more compositional pencil drawings and a round of gouache and pastel sketches to establish highlights, I still felt that the composition of what I started with was too complicated and unnecessary. I felt I was struggling with elements where each elements worked in its own right but not as part of the painting.

Cropping the image on the left to leave out a difficult-to-read midground was my solution for the time being. It seems to work a lot better through this simplification. Click here to see the cropped image.

Pastel/Gouache on paper, Maktesh HaGadol
40x30cm

Pencil sketch of ridge detail

Making my own pastel(s)

... sounds much more glorious than this unsuspecting lump of mid-value grey that's drying on the shelf. I've been collecting pastel dust from my paintings at home - less in an attempt to extend the lifetime of my beige cheap carpet (if anything, I'm looking for an excuse to replace it) but more in hope that all the greens, blues, purple, reds and yellows would come together in the end to make a neutral pastel stick.

Yesterday then was the day: I had collected cool and warm shades separately but the jar with the cool ones looks suspiciously similar to the vastness that is my Blue-Green-Earth Unison set ... I don't quite remember why I bought that set now, but I haven't really used it much at all. After mixing both cool and warm dust and grinding it with pestle and mortar, I added distilled water and rolled it into shape and it's been drying since.



This is the really simple way of making your own pastel - the binder that keeps the pigments together and determines degree of hardness/softness is gum tragacanth - yet, in the pastel dust, it is still contained and does not require anything other than merely adding water.

There are various instuctions on making soft pastels online - ranging from the complex ones like in this article by Phyllis Franklin on Wetcanvas to rather straightforward ones such as on the Earth Pigments website (who also supply, to North America, a glorious range of Natural Earth pigments). One of the few UK suppliers of the binder is the long established Cornelissen and Son in London who supply a wide range of traditional pigments and specialist artist equipment.

Two reasons mad me start looking into ways of making pastels:
- to match the hues and pigments of some of my favourite oil colours
- and more recently as part of my research into the desert sands and how natural iron oxide colours them in a variety of hues from gold to violet.

For the latter, I've come across the Clearwell Caves Ochre mine in England which also supplies fine ground ochre pigment from yellow to an unusual deep purple for painting purposes. That dark purple looks great - and it looks pretty close to one of my favourite dark neutrals I've been using.

Yet - somehow I feel that this isn't the kind of activity that my kitchen surface would welcome... yet another reason to look for some studio space, I suspect!