At the very outset pastels deceive you. Sitting their in their box they appear to be doing no harm, chalky, quiet, utterly unimposing. Then you make one spot on rough paper and something changes. An hour vanishes. Then another. You look up and it is a different light. That’s the trap. A trap of unbelievable delight, pigment-streaked. Look at this!
Enrolling in a pastel painting course does not mean essentially learning to do this. It is all about learning to take it slow and really observe things. Colors which you had passed by your whole life demand attention. Raking light on a wall in the afternoon. The unusual purple which lived in what you thought was a dull brown shadow. After you have looked these things right, you can no longer use your ordinary eyes.
The majority of beginners come out expecting a course to provide them with techniques. A kind of decision making framework is more valuable than actually good instruction. Why is this obtained advantage to remain tender? Why is that highlight objectionable? Techniques are merely means. To make decisions is the actual job.
Layering is bewildering to newcomers to almost all conceivable groups, and understandably so. It is retrogressive – a construction of dark to light, where color mixes on the paper optically and not on a palette of any type. What it takes thirty pages of written exposition to explain can be demonstrated in minutes. This is exactly the reason why it is important to be in a physical room or be in a live virtual session, instead of going through the same recorded tutorial at midnight hoping that it will finally make sense.
More supply questions keep rising. Soft or hard pastels? Sanded paper or velour? Fixative or none? The simple question: purchase only that which the course prescribes and no more. Novices are used to waste money on supplies and spend less on adequate training. A reversal on that ratio yields significantly improved results.
The third week will be a discouraging one. It is a part of the process, not to be considered. Your eye grows quicker than your hand, and before something begins to feel good, all the things begin to look bad again. That irritating hesitation is not regression it is a sign that your grasp of things is becoming more intense than your performers. Push through it. The emotion has got a time limit.
The surrounding individuals in a course are more than one anticipates. Somebody will make it out of the blue something about edges or temperature that opens the door to a notion that you have been circling on the long all week. Such an unintentional discovery does not occur when a person is viewing individual tutorials independently.
The dust is irreversible and indisputable. Wear an apron.
Stability is the winner in this case over talent. Appear, do dissatisfying work, study on it, go back. It is gradual in improving, and, at one point or another, alarmingly apparent.