Pastel Methods
For pastel, I work on dark paper, anywhere from medium-grey to black, depending on the nature of the subject to be rendered. I never bother to apply colored tones, but only simple grey or black - since pastels are opaque, and my pastel work tends to result in total coverage of the paper, the dark tone underlying the work is ultimately completely hidden from view in the finished product. Its benefits are limited to the duration of the work's progress, when it allows bright colors to be perceived accurately in contrast against the dark paper.
Except in the very early stages of a painting, I try to avoid smudging the pigment with my fingers or any other tool, since smudging tends to produce thin, muddied colors. There is generally no smudging at all in the later stages of the work, where color mixing is achieved exclusively through a painstaking process in which the marks of color are carefully cross-hatched and interwoven into one another, building layer upon layer. This requires a very delicate touch.
Although I've used both the Rembrandt and Schminke brands of pastel in the past, and still use them for some purposes, I've primarily become a fan of the Sennelier line of pastels since 2008. I now own a Sennelier box-set of 525 colors, and about 90% of the work gets done with these. Sennelier is distinctive for its range of very dark colors, which tend to be difficult to acquire in pastel. The darker range of Sennelier has significantly enhanced the quality of my pastel work by expanding the value range of my pictures in that medium.
Another material upgrade that has revolutionized my pastel work is the creation of custom paper surfaces. In my experience, pastel can be either a joy or a horror to use, depending on the nature of the paper substrate. In the past, I've used a black print-making paper called Arches Cover, and I've also tried a variety of "sandpapers" and other products that are supposed to be intended for pastel. But, finding all of these to be unsatisfactory for one reason or another, I began preparing my own paper surfaces to produce exactly the sort of feel and durability that I want. Achieving this requires a complicated procedure that I arrived at throughout two years of trial and error.
I initially experimented with a mixture of black acrylic gesso and finely ground lava pumice, generously thinned with water - a few of my pictures, like "Firebreather," were successfully rendered on such a surface. But this method was fickle, often delivering poor results if I happened to deviate from the exact formulation by even the slightest degree, since the acrylic gesso can easily produce a hard, resistant surface if it's applied too thickly.
Instead, after experimenting with everything from wax to plaster, I eventually discovered the benefit of rabbit-skin glue, a substance traditionally used by oil painters in the priming of canvas. This glue proved to be the solution to all of my pastel-surface problems. Below, I'll describe the entire process of preparing the paper, which involves several key steps.
I use 300-pound Fabriano hot-press watercolor paper. Hot-press paper is necessary for its uniformly smooth surface. I avoid cold-press because of its rugged texture - since I do detailed work, I want the surface to be as consistently smooth as possible. For my purposes, 300-pound paper is much to be preferred over thinner, lighter-weight papers because of its extra durability and relatively greater resistance to curling and buckling when exposed to atmospheric moisture.
I soak the paper in water for at least 30 minutes, then stretch it by stapling it to a board. Although it's not absolutely necessary, I generally try to keep the paper stapled to the same board throughout the entire process of priming the paper and producing the finished work, to ensure that it remains perfectly flat right up until the time that the work is ready to be framed.
Hot-press paper is pleasantly smooth, but it does have a sort of hard, "closed" surface - not especially receptive to a big-particle medium like pastel. I'm aiming to produce an "open" surface, although on a very tiny scale - a sort of irregular, granulated micro-texture - so I start by roughing up the paper. Once it has dried completely after soaking and stretching, I scrub the paper with medium-grit sandpaper to give the surface a soft, velvety quality. Then I follow up with fine sandpaper to reduce excess texture. The end result is smooth, lacking any troublesome holes or pits in the surface, but with a fuzzy surface similar to velveteen.
But that velveteen surface is soft and fragile. It will quickly shred and fall apart when subjected to the stress of being worked upon, and the fuzziness will deliver excessively undefined marks from the pastel - you can't render a sharp edge on it. So, why sand it in the first place, then? Because it seems to make a difference in the final product - I get a softer, more buttery quality from my pastels if I soften the paper first.
To give this fragile surface more strength and definition, I apply the rabbit-skin glue, prepared in the traditional manner. I keep a batch of the stuff in my refrigerator, where it cools to a soft gel. I just grab up some of this gel, and rub it into the paper by hand. It quickly melts and forms a sort of frothy liquid, which looks terrible at first, but it will soak in and become completely invisible once it dries. Prior to applying it to the paper, I also mix in a couple of additional ingredients:
- I add a few spoonfuls of Bon Ami powder, a common household cleanser containing finely ground calcium carbonate and feldspar, which act as mild abrasives - these ingredients give the glue coating a little more substance and toothiness to grab and hold the pastel particles. The advantage of Bon Ami over other powders is that it does not contain bleach, acid or any other chemicals commonly found in household cleansers, which would be destructive to the work.
- I also add a generous amount of black watercolor pigment to the glue mixture, in order to stain the white paper with a darker tone. I formerly tried using India ink for this purpose, but found that an undiluted coat of this ink can create a resistant surface that will repel the adhesion of the pastel pigment. Instead, I now simply use any cheap watercolor pigment - it doesn't need to be anything fancy.
In the end, I have a velveteen foundation covered with a single coating of the darkened glue/powder mixture, which is rubbed into the paper by hand. Just one coat seems to be sufficient.
If done propertly, this results in the best pastel substrate that I've worked on, although it behaves somewhat differently from more traditional surfaces - in particular, soft pastel feels a bit more like oil pastel on this surface. The best thing about the glue priming is that it's strong enough to hold up against the abuse of pastel work, but it has an open, granulated surface that receives the pigment well. It's the very opposite of the sort of hard, glassy surfaces that repel pastel. I think that the dry glue actually crumbles and breaks down under the constant friction of the pastels rubbing against it, but I can grind through it for a long time before wearing it down to the bare paper. Unlike the varieties of gritty pastel papers or boards that are commercially available, my own custom surface actually rolls with the punches - it works precisely because it's not hard, gritty or resistant. It breaks away and crumbles into a powder much like the pastel itself, and the two just blend together as the work proceeds. That allows for a smoother, more buttery pastel stroke, and for better adhesion of the pigment.
Another benefit of this technique is the unique ability to remove an entire portion of a painting and then rebuild it from scratch. The need to do this often presents itself in pastel. For instance, if I've overworked an area of a picture, the pigments can get compacted very tightly to form a hard surface that resists further work. Or, perhaps I simply feel inclined to reconsider some aspect of a troublesome painting, and might decide to change the picture dramatically. When faced with such circumstances, my custom surface allows me to sand away an entire portion of a well-developed painting, then re-prime it with a new coat of glue. I just rub some glue into the sanded area with my fingers, let it dry, and then I'm ready to work again, rebuilding the painting from the ground up. Since pastels are opaque, I can seamlessly blend the patched area into the rest of the painting. I've done as many as four or five of these patches in the same part of a painting before finally achieving the desired result, without leaving any tell-tale signs of the procedure. No more dead-ends in pastel - now, I can turn around and change direction in the work, to save a painting that might otherwise have been a total loss.