Textured Wall # 2

Textured Wall #2, 50x70 cm
Pastel on board
Gesa Helms 2007

I realise that I did never post write about this painting though it has been part of the sidebar for a long time.

I only framed it this week and took it straight from the framer to the drop off for the art sale. They hung it, but by the time we came to the sale it had already disappeared to its new home. So, my first painting to hang somewhere I don't know. Funny feeling, but quite nice, really.

The painting was done on primed Bristol board, with an acrylic underpainting and plenty of yellow, red and earth coloured acrylic paint and ink splashes before I started with the pastels. There are a few directional clues and markers in there: edges and ceiling corners which could easily read as something else entirely. The relative smoothness of the primed (with pumice powder) Bristol board makes a much softer work surface than my other boards that tend to be a lot coarser. Still, there is plenty of tooth to grip the pastels.

The ultramarine underpainting and the related soft pastel hues make this one rather calm and balanced - an effect that the earthy beiges, red-browns complement further. All the while, the red and yellow splashes shine through, create texture and markings that add interest and movement - not just along the corner lines but also across the whole painting.

Gie's a gouache

In the fields, Mixed media on paper
40x30cm

My favourite Saturday morning art group is back again, and while it will take a while to balance Friday evenings with Saturday mornings, it was exciting to be back - it's a great group of people and many of them have been going for a long time.

I'm keen on doing more work with oils but am not quite in the mood for that yet. So, I took my tubes of gouache along - I got them as a present early in summer but still haven't tried them out - what have I been missing!

It's funny how some media just feel right straight away and others just don't. From pastels I moved to acrylics and I remember vividly the intense frustration when everything just ended up as muddy, plasticky grey. In constrast, oil paints were just a revelation - their luminosity, the various oils and assorted accompaniments to go with them (even smelly turps) just add to the experience.

So, gouache has been a plan to pursue for a good while - really as a means to keep mixing media with pastels, and there's plenty of artists who did precisely that - mainly Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas - to which I won't link now but make a mental note of yet another draft folder file.

High pigment load and their ability to mix, remix and keep playing with makes gouache an exciting water-based medium. Their opaqueness (or is it opacity?) makes them ideal as underpainting for pastels - just see in the sketch above in particular with the blues and magenta where the intensity of hue would be difficult to achieve solely based on pastels.

The painting is based on one of my outdoors sketches at my parent's place.... low in a field of grasses with a high horizon lines made up of trees - some cobalt blue would have been better for the sky, but there is always another time. The mixed media are gouache, acrylic ink and pastel.

Here's to new paintings and explorations.

Going painting...

... my bags are packed for a week of outdoor painting up North. I've prepared about 10 panels for the pastels. Some of them have splashings of acrylic paint on top, I hope to use them for some detailed close-ups.
The weather has been pretty bad recently, so rather than lemon yellow, the last batch got Payne's Grey for colours. I reckon that should work pretty well for low clouds and rain in the Scottish Highlands.



I've also packed all my other things: oils, acrylics and drawing materials - a holiday is a holiday is a holiday - and it would be a shame if I really wanted to use the oils and not have them with me, wouldn't it?!

All my underpaintings

I made up another batch of pastel supports over the weekend. I experimented a few different ways of making my own boards after I found that ready-made boards where both rather expensive but also too even in surface for the kind of texturing I was looking for.
For the past few paintings I've been using large sheets of simple grey boards cut in half, so that I end with a good sized 50x70 cm boards. I gesso these with simple white emulsion twice, then add a layer of equal parts emulsion, pumice powder for texture and water with a broad brush, sand this down if I want a smooth board or leave it with broad brushstrokes if I want a stronger texture, and finally paint a top layer of acrylic paint, pumice powder and water (again equal parts).
The colours I've mostly used are lemon yellow, raw siena or raw umber, but my last batch also included some muted green (still trying to find something for Scottish summer landscapes) and warm yellow ochre.




Detail of surface texture on board

Details of wall textures

Textured Wall No 2, pastel on board, detail

I've used acrylic underpaintings for pastels for quite some time. But I've been keen on exploring what I could do with underpaintings and different kinds of markmaking on these for adding more textual information before painting with pastels.

These wall textures have got a lot of splashes of acrylic paints in different colours. - Some with paint straight out of the tube, others diluted with water.

The two yellow ones (centre and top left) in this detailed close-up are cadmium yellow undiluted... There are other smaller ones on the mid left in diluted ultramarine.

Textured wall series

Textured Wall no 1, pastel on board, 50x70cm


This is the first of so far three paintings on wall textures. Most of my paintings until recently have been landscapes with relatively little detail (maybe bar foreground). Wanting to experiment with more detailed textures and colour changes, I was looking round the studio and found plenty of cracks, fissures and marks on the walls.

This was the first one of them - it's on board primed with gesso and texture added with pumice powder. Then I applied an acrylic underpainting and various splashes of more acrylic paint on top of that.

Lemon yellow as underpainting was quite a discovery too - it offsets and plays with the other, more subtle colours rather beautifully I think.