Using and Blending Color for Your Chalk Drawing
Hi, my name is Mary Demigo, and I’m a private art instructor and I’m here working with one of my students, Summer. We are working on chalk pastel drawing, focusing on a still life. And what I like to go over now is the different pastel techniques that we can use to place in our drawing. So there’s various different kinds of chalk pastels that we can used, they either come on a pencil form, or more like a chalk block. So depending on whatever you prefer, I will show you both of them today. First technique I’m gonna go over is using the side of the pastel, so you just basically taking the pastel and very lightly go across the page. And you will see a bit of the paper underneath when you do use the side of the pastel. Next technique is using the end of the pastel. The end of the pastel has more of a square shape to it, so we can just, you want to have lines going across the page. The point of the pastel, if you find a pastel that has more of a pointed edge, you haven’t use for a while, and you can get a thinner line. This might be a good technique if you’re using, if you are drawing grass, or trying to add detail or texture to an object. Our next technique is using short strokes. So I’m just gonna again take the point of the pastel and just dab my pastel on the page, and I can overlap it with another color, you can use two colors to create depth and dimension or if you would like they create a pattern. This technique can also be used if you are drawing an animal and you have the hair of the animal. Next we can used the long strokes, very similar, we just drawing and using the pastel across the page, one more, go in different directions. We can cross hatch over our lines, okay. Varying pressure. Pressure is how much you press on to the paper, so the harder I press, the more darker the color is going to be and the less I press, it’s going to be lighter. So I get a good gradation of color. Dark green to light green and it fades. One thing you wanna be careful of, and this is safety, is if you do press hard, you’re going to see that we create some chalk dust on to our paper. You wanna make sure that you do not blow the, the dust into the air, we can just leave it there for now, because we don’t want, we’re gonna make sure that we don’t get the dust into the air. Or we can just used a cloth or tissue and wipe it away. Our next technique will be blending two colors. So what you’re gonna do is use the side of the pastel and we can just overlap another color over top to create a pink that has a little bit more orange in it. This maybe something good that you would use if you’re coloring in the sky. So just continue to overlap the colors. Hey, then we are blending with the cloth, so we’re gonna do the same thing, just gonna overlap the colors and you can use a tissue. If you do have a cloth for this, and we’re just going to go from the edge of the color and kinda go in a circular motion as we blend our color. So we get a much softer look with using the cloth. Okay, and also what I have on here is using complimentary colors. When we are using complimentary colors, we wanna think about how we can create a color being darker and we’re gonna move on to showing how to add light and shadow for color and if we have a color that’s red, we don’t really want to add black to it, coz it will dull out the color or take away the brightness. So the compliment of red would be green, and you’re gonna see all this a little bit later when we want to make red a darker red, we can use green to blend in to show and so on as we go through the rest of our colors. Orange will be paired with blue and yellow will be paired with purple. And now we are ready to move on to our drawing that we had ready and use our pastel techniques to add color to our still life drawing.