What an excellent workshop, inspiring and full of down to earth, practical help and advice! Aina likes to use a warm-coloured Pastelmat as the ground for her pastel paintings, which begin with an underpainting. She demonstrated this, using soft pastels on the side, working this way and that for texture and in a range of appropriate colours, starting with a mid-tone, then including darks, followed by lights - but never using pure white except for highlights in the final stages. She showed us how she blended the colours, using a small cotton cloth or a finger. Further layers were applied to work up a loose background, before going on to refine and add detail, with blenders, more soft pastel and harder pastel pencils. It was interesting to see how some earlier layers of colour re-appeared as shaped blenders were applied. We had a range of Aina’s own photos to choose from, or our own, but not, she stressed, photos from the internet, magazines, calendars, etc., which would be copyright. Artists could use such photos purely for practice, but never for display or gifting to others. I thought members did themselves and Aina proud, as I hope you can see from the examples shown below.. |     |
Next Thursday, Hilary will be presenting the still life and model. And look out for the Message regarding Sally L’s theme for the following week (click here).
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