Discovering Underpainting for Pastels

Last November I went to West Dean College for a course on pastel painting with Sarah Bee. She opened up my eyes to exciting posibilities with soft pastel - namely underpainting. Up until then I had just layered the pastel and painted on typical pastel paper that comes in a pad. I never particularly liked the colours that comes in the pad - this stems back to me being a watercolourist by nature - I just love seeing the white of the paper showing through. The other problem with layering pastels like this is that you have to really totally cover the paper, as that paper can fade in sunlight, thereby changing the whole character of your painting.

Sarah Bee has a really novel approach - that being painting on a very loose acrylic underpainting - and that is on top of a textured surface of clear gesso - in fact the placing of the texture is just as important as the rest of it. Well - searching the internet for information today, I came across an article that came out earlier in the year from Jackson's Art Blog. It was promoting Sarah Bee and the Pastel Society's exhibition at the Mall Galleries. I actually went to this exhibition (on the recommendation of Sarah, who said I would be amazed at what people were doing with pastel nowadays - she was right). At the exhibition was the painting she had done as a demonstration at our course! It was great, as I had never seen it finished. The link to the article is here: Jackson's Art Blog about Sarah Bee The painting she did for us was the last one ‘Warm Rocks and Cool Water at Haytor Quarry’.

Since then I have discovered a couple of other artists who do interesting underpaintings to their pastels. Karen Margulis is an American artist who I have mentioned before. She does underpaintings with a number of different mediums and she is very generous in describing how she does it, step by step. Here is a link to her website - all you need to do is type "underpainting" in the seach box on the right and an myriad of blog entries come up -all really interesting to read: Karen Margulis

In one of her blog entries, Karen mentions another American artist, called Richard McKinley. She had been on a course of his and found him inspirational in his approach to pastel painting. This blog entries, with lots of tips, can be found here: Richard McKinley

I discovered recently that he had done a DVD on underpainting - so I bought it and really enjoyed it. Obviously it only touched lightly on the finished painting, but what I want to do is not quite the same as him - I want to leave more of the underpainting showing, so this was the section I wanted to concentrate on. This DVD can be found here: Bold underpainting for lively pastel landscapes There is a certain amount of theory on this DVD, but I don't think there is any harm in going over this information every so often.