Placing Color on Your Chalk Drawing
Hi, my name is Mary Demigo, I’m a private art instructor, I'm here with one of my students, Summer. And we are working on a chalk pastel drawing with still life, we’re focusing on flower still life. Now that we have our preliminary drawing done and we have gone over some of the chalk pastel techniques, we are ready to start adding our first layer of chalk onto our drawing. And so the first color we can start with is our green, so we’re gonna have, we have various colors of greens that we can use just again, to show more depth in our drawing. Since it was the first object that we started drawing, working bottom to top we can start with the stems. Alright, so it’s better to start lighter to dark, and so we’re gonna start with the lighter green. Again, you can use, either use the block chalk or the chalk pencil. Okay, so let’s start bottom to top, and we have our drawing that we can look at. See where the light shadows hit. And so again, we just very lightly drawing and we can go on a diagonal with our chalk and then we work all the way up through the stem. And since we already have that color in our hand, we can move on to our other stems and fill in that color and then just move around the page where you have the rest of the green stems. Then we can take our other shade of green and we can start to show where the shadow is on our drawing. So, this drawing I’m working with left to right, so the shadow I have is on the left of the picture, and then we’ll gonna pull in the lighter colors on the right. So I’m just going over and I’m just overlapping and just blending by, going over, and again you can use your tissue to blend, you get a softer look. Or you can use your blender and you can pull the color. So this can really get into some smaller areas of the drawing that you can't get into with the tissue. And we wanna make sure that as we are doing this, we are careful where our hand is coz it can start to smudge our drawing. So, if you have a clean tissue, you can always put that over top, so that you are not transferring the color somewhere else in your drawing that you don’t want it to be. Okay, so that’s just the basis for the stem, then we can move on to the flowers. We have lots of different colors in the rose, there’s bright pink, there’s red, there’s orange, and we see, I see a little bit of yellow. So we can get those colors ready. So I always like to start on the edge of the petals and then pull the color in towards the center. That’s usually where the light hits the petal. So I’m just lightly going across and not really pressing, using too much pressure on the chalk and just kinda outlining my drawing, so they’re pulling the color in. Then we can use our one technique where we blend two colors and just overlapping the colors of… so I’m gonna continue to do this throughout the whole drawing and add in yellow there, and pull the color down as I go over top. As I move around the page, I will continue with my drawing, and we get to about this point, this is when we are ready to move on to the highlights and shadows of our drawing.