Fall 2019 Pastel Class

Project: Alaska Fishing Village Week 1

The first thing I showed was how to get the design on my paper using what I call "poor man's transfer paper" by applying chalk to the back of my design, then going over the lines with a pencil or the end of a brush to transfer the design to my paper.

Usually I use a color like a light blue or purple so I won't have problems when I'm working my painting but because I am going to be doing an alcohol wash over charcoal, I just used the charcoal for this step.

Once I got the design on my paper - I am using sanded Bristol paper mounted on foamcore that I made myself - I wanted to do a rather loose value under painting using black (charcoal) to get my trees in and to establish some of the values (light to dark) of my painting.

When I was doing the trees I was trying to keep the spaces at the top edge of the trees and suggesting tall and short trees. These are not Christmas trees, they are not perfect, they are not all the same height. These are things you need to keep in mind as you work.

The closer to the buildings I got the more I tried to cover the paper so I could get a dark background. On the right, there is a lighter tree so I did leave it blank.

In the water, I pulled the charcoal straight down going around the reflections of the buildings.

In the buildings where I wanted a little bit of a value change, I lightly skimmed the paper with the charcoal so there was only a little color to move around in the next step.

The next step is using rubbing alcohol to set the design onto my paper. This is just plain rubbing like you get at the drug store, nothing special, I used my watercolor brush to apply it to my paper.

I went over everything that I had charcoal on to set in so it won't come off as easily when I go to paint, this also establishes your dark values of which there are many in this project. Where I needed just a little color I used what was on the brush to do parts of the houses and roofs.


This is where we finished in class, try to get you paintings to this point before next class.

keep painting and I will see you in class.