3 Wet Pastel Techniques...using alcohol or water

I'm pastelist Avon Waters and today I'm going to show you three ways to start a pastel painting now there's way more than three ways but we're going to use alcohol in two of the ways and we're going to use uh tap water in the third way as I said there's tons of ways to start a pastel last episode we started with just dry pastel this is primarily for some beginners a lot of you have used alcohol and water before so we'll touch into other wet pastel techniques later on this particular wet pastel technique is for underpainting underpainting is once you get something drawn on you start to try to use either The Pastels or the alcohol or the water in order to create some values so that as you progress in the painting later on in other videos later on you'll see how we move from those grave values or color values and start adjusting and and making applications to the color we ultimately want to begin with today we're going to use small throwaway brushes basically these are hobby brushes they're real cheap uh this one's supposed to be a watercolor brush and this one's a synthetic fiber brush from a local hobby store I also may use one of my favorite things for larger p pieces I'm going to work on a piece that is uh uh 8 by8 I believe there's two three 8 by 8s that we're going to do but these are chip brushes and at the hardware store they're a little longer than that but uh they wear down and they spail out like this but they make some nice effects especially in an underpainting we'll be using isopropyl alcohol you can use vodka you can use ever CLE you can use uh naturalized alcohol from a hardware store it doesn't matter the important thing is that it's some sort of percentage of alcohol 70% or higher the higher the percentage the faster it will evaporate each whether it's 70 or 90 or 94% alcohol the each one has a slightly different characteristic which you would have to learn then we're going to use regular tap water we're going to I've got old yogurt trays nothing fancy the color palette that I've picked out is going to be from uh blue violet to red or maybe Violet to Orange on our color wheel so I'm picking out analogous colors that are side by side to one another you will get to see how each of these colors interacts based on the two methods now a quick disclaimer just because these are beginning methods using wet medium does not mean that it's like learning a a instrument and you're in book one playing Mary had a little lamb and twinkle twinkle and you'll never use these again there are some very fine Master artists that will start their paintings to this day using these techniques now my paintings I start them often with alcohol I start them often with water I will vary up depending on how I feel that day of how I will start my painting and sometimes based on my experience I will determine whether I'm going to use other mediums that are wet during the painting process you can use wet mediums anytime during the painting process but as a beginner I recommend you stick with water and alcohol until you've Master the underpainting process which we started in the last episode so let's get started I've gone to my Sketchbook and I've pulled out just some basic washes now you can see I played there some colors in these the light direction is different I'm ultimately going to pick this uh wash that has just neutral values as opposed to something that already has color in it if I wanted to use a yellow yellow green and the violets that uh might be in this or blues that might be in this then I would select this but because we're going to experiment and you are learning let's start with something that's just basic Bly gray values now if you are not to the point where you're making your own sketches or you're doing your own watercolor washes work from a photograph there's inherent dangers with a photograph as we said in one of the other episodes the some of the dangers are that you will try to match those colors or you will try to do some things that the photograph will mislead you with two dark of Shadows or two light of lights but we're just in the learning process we're just learning how to block in and use wet mediums with our dry pastels I'm going to cover this up and that will not let me get confused or distracted by those colors this is my traveling pastel set and what I've done is I've pulled out some of the colors I think I will use if I I'm not married to these colors these are just to block in these are not going to be what the final color would be if I continued to paint beyond the the Block in stage of this if you have a lot of pastels then you might be it might be helpful if you pull those pastels out in the color groups based on what you selected off of the color wheel okay I've cheated a little bit here and made some light pencil marks just so to expedite this video a little bit but we are going to basically use the a charcoal this is a uh compressed charcoal you may you can use fine charcoal but we're going to use this charcoal in order to lay in some basic shapes just like we did in the last video where we have some basic shapes in there now my light source from this is going to be almost from above but kind of behind so we're going to have a little less light on this part of the barn we're going to have some bright light on this part because I want it to be the center of interest it's in the 1/3 area unfortunately in this drawing is almost in the half but we do have the 1/3 going here and then the roof that is kind of facing us has a a little bit of light on it because it's in an angle going up that way so we just kind of sketch in this and as I said there's a lot of pastelis that use use this technique with alcohol and sketching in things first this is just a little simple geometric shapes just so you can get the feel of things we'll put a horizon back in here with some distance tree trees going off at an angle in the distance this way and I may or may not have some trees up in this area here but because the sun is coming coming down this way and from behind we will have some of these shadows out in here that we will just darken up a little bit when you reach the stage where you've got this drawn in or blocked in with the charcoal and the process is going to be the same we just take our alcohol and just put a little bit in here we don't need a lot we just need enough to wet the brush the bigger the piece the more of the alcohol you're going to use dip into the alcohol and at this particular point we are going to try to match some of the values that are up in here now because the sky is darker we're going to put a little bit more charcoal back up in here and we have to get some in here just like other painting we start in our shadow areas the darkest parts that are created by created by the the lighting that your particular piece has now you see how this alcohol mixed with the charcoal creates a wash the same way as if you were doing a graphic um pencil sketch with graphite and I want to keep this clear and we have a little bit of a dark edge here because again the light source is coming in from behind and I forgot to fill that in so no big deal now the alcohol is not dried yet this is 70% and I can go back into some of these dark areas and grab a little bit more in order to sketch this thing out you'll see oil painters often use a technique similar to this with um one of their paints thinned out sometimes it's a red sometimes it's a yellow ochre burnt Umber and I've got these trees the base of the trees are going to be a little bit darker I want to wet this down some here you can see that this is darker than the beige color of this this is a sanded art 400 I'm going to grab the bigger brush because I have these bigger areas now I want to get covered and from my drawing you can see that the background is a little bit darker this has reflected light because of the plane that it's on I'm going to pull some of that dark down because it I want to match closer to what my drawing is here my drawing does not have because I didn't know which one I would pick my drawing does not have the shadow of This Barn in there and this front is a going to grab some more charcoal this front is a little darker I'll pull some out of the shade of the overhang and we're pretty close I could stop right there and begin to lay in color and I have a good idea when I lay in color then what my values are going to be what areas are going to be the lightest what are going to be middle tones and some of the darkest darks let's move on to outlining this next one but using Color okay now this time I'm going to lay this in using some color and typically a lot of artists will start with with the darkest darks and sometimes I do but because this has a unique little piece that we want to keep light I'm just going to lay in some of the uh yellow for now it will be a different color when I'm done then I'm going to lay in some of these colors back in here as the trees and the background pads away and I want my darkest to be some blue violet eventually but I'm just going to lay in some color I'm not pressing hard but I just want to outline once again where some of these things are and I will use that Violet as the shadow area also for underneath the eaves cuz you saw in the first one how that how that alcohol moves that pigment around and that's what we're after in here this time we'll get some of this Violet up in the skies I'm not going to put it all the way in again because I know that it's going to eventually bleed this side of our barn add a little blue mixing on the canvas or the paper itself right now now this is kind of a pink very lightly put on but we are trying to capture some of we're trying to capture some of the values ahead of time as opposed to when we just Ed the charcoal we're trying to capture some of those values so that we get a nice a nice set of color base down that we can paint over and I may lighten this up that will blend I know from experience that that will blend together and create some variation in the sky we have to also get now the opposite on my color wheel were some yellow greens and I could put some yellow Greens in here because they are part of the compliments of what the colors were that I showed you when I selected my palette now for beginners I often say palette or color scheme artists call it the palette but I don't want to confuse you with the palettes that artists use use that they hold in their hand to paint from now with this when we're using Color I will paint and use the yellow colors or the the lightest colors first because the color is going to pick up and I could rinse out my brush and another uh thing of alcohol the same as you would a watercolor brush but some of those colors are going to carry over into this brush from color to color so I like to start with my lightest colors and the reason I went into that green was because I wanted a little bit of that green maybe if it didn't wash all the way out to mix in here with the red red and green are compliments therefore it would create a gray base eventually again our goal is just to get some of these things Blended in pastel that I used before with the charcoal it is almost dry now and it's only been a couple minutes if you are a plain air painter like to paint plain air a lot of artists would use the alcohol outside because they can do an underpainting and it will dry really really fast as opposed to the water which we'll show you here in a minute notice how I grab that blue and the blue mixed with that pinkish on the side and darkened it up as the more of this that you do the more you'll become experienced with how much mixing these colors will do and again we are just roughing in the goal here is not to have a a finished painting at this stage the goal is only to block in some large areas that you can begin to use as a guide to paint from you can see as opposed to using just charcoal this becomes very messy and a lot of beginners will really not like the messiness that this creates and you can see this stays wet for a while so I can go in here manipulate lines but see how this is all blurred and gotten into the whites there or whites the light color that's going to be on that roof I'm not too concerned because pastel you can go over colors really really easy unlike oils and and other mediums where once you get something muddy and dirty you have a hard time bringing light back into a dark area or dark back into a light area but pastels it's really really easy I would be uh able to paint from this most beginners would probably like the charcoal and alcohol only starting point because you have a much better line drawing but if you want to see some colors and see how they're mixing the application of color to make your drawing and then use alcohol on it is a great way to for people that are colorist okay we're going to switch to water now and you'll see how the pastel reacts very differently for the water demonstration I'm going to go back to using the compressed charcoal one because it is a whole lot easier for beginners to use compressed charcoal and get a gray scale type of drawing once they add either alcohol or water as you saw using Color to lay something out using wet techniques becomes very messy you remember from our previous video where we didn't use any wet techniques we had much better success of keeping the colors separated because the dry pastel would blend a lot less into the into the other colors that surrounded it unlike a wet pastel technique and again we want to get those Eaves in there I forgot that little thing there last time and our sky gradiated from dark to a little bit lighter down in through here we got a little bit right there that edge of the barn this drawing is slightly different and this will stay wet much much longer you have much more time to manipulate the Grays and the blacks using water but again if you're looking to paint in plain air outside many times the drying of the alcohol is an advantage because you're able to to continue before your light really changes a whole lot I got some Eaves there and some Eaves there okay so I can pick up this P pastel I can pick up this charcoal and I can get our end on this remember we're going to leave this somewhat blank this is a little lighter in our drawing so before I switch the Big Brush which can really move a lot of this around fast I want to get this in here and this I can darken up by stealing some of the some of the charcoal that's in the shadows down in here and on the side of the barn and I can make the relationships a little closer to what I think they should be for this particular drawing that gets us in the ballpark I'll go to the bigger brush and we want to get that done and probably we'll have some lighter colors out in there and it's up to you if you decide that all this running is too much if this was alcohol this would be leaving darker streaks but because it's water you're left with fewer streaks there was a little bit there you can see a little uh phosphorescing here or as you can you see you can move things around you've got plenty of time with water as opposed to alcohol I recommend that you try both and and eventually settle on something that uh works for you after you've had enough experience with it but you can see I can get rid of some of those drip marks They Don't Really concern me too much because again as I said earlier pastel will hide a lot of these things and I can move some of this up in here because you remember with the alcohol version we had some trees that would probably turn out to be some blue violets going off into the distance there you can just really move stuff around quite easily okay I want you to try to do both or all three methods pick two at at least and try two and compare them uh maybe water using just the charcoal and the outline would be the best way for you to go as a a very very beginning beginner but if you've done some other painting another medium and you understand how those um edges can be cleaned up that's it for today's demo I will go in on the next episode and block take one of these and block one of these in with the colors that we've selected and do a little mixing online and discuss then how we go from these rough value sketches with water or alcohol and I'll pick one of those and we'll move forward with it but in the meantime please do some practice pick one of those try it pick two try that and by all means have fun be happy I want you to enjoy art because art is a great way to relieve stress and you'll find happiness I know a lot of people including myself that it's through ART we had other jobs we had the stress all day long and art relieves that stress so if you like the content by all means hit the like button and if you really love the content and you want to follow us go to the channel and hit subscribe and notifications until next time happy painting and be happy by all means and have fun

Channel: Avon Waters - pastel artist

Views: 8,841

Keywords: wet pastel techniques, wet-pastel techniques, wet-techniques, Avon waters, Ever Clear, Everclear, denatured alcohol, de-natured alcohol, denatured-alcohol, alcohol and pastel, pastel painting, landscapes in pastel, wet-pastels, painting with alcohol, tutorial, learning pastel

Id: xit4Z1ipjC0

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024