Alcohol And Wet Pastel Can Be Used At Any Stage of The Process

wet pastel techniques mixing Dry soft pastel powder medium with wet medium that's today's topic but unlike previous episode where I talked about three different wet pastel techniques which I will try to remember to link below this time I am using alcohol but we're using it in a different way than in the beginning stages many people learn wet pastel by using alcohol water and other mediums to block in or get the rough colors set in place on their pastel today I'm going to use it in the middle of the process of painting we have a image that's already painted we're going to destroy it and try to create something new different and more vibrant because it just isn't it just isn't vibrant I put my paintings up on a wall I call it my fermentation wall and when I walk in every morning in the studio I look at that fermentation wall to see what's the next step for this painting or that painting and in this particular case I walked in and it's like this painting is just dull it's boring it's not got enough depth it's not got enough texture it's not got enough of this and that so today I decided I am going to destroy it selectively destroy certain parts of it using alcohol normally alcohol as I said is used in the beginning stages of the process just to block in and smear the colors around the alcohol dries and then you paint your pastels over it this time I'm going to start where it is probably oh maybe 50% along in the process and then the alcohol should add more interest and more ghost as we go along so let's get started as you can see I do have some distance area and I have established a pette of the red violets and oranges and yellows so I'm using analogous colors but as you can see um there's not a lot of detail here which is what I really like about painting with wet pastel is that you can choose at the very end when you want to get detail but this area right up in here this is part of a tree originally that was hanging over and my Vision here is maybe I can do some things with the alcohol to create not a part of a tree leaning into the picture but maybe additional trees that set somewhere between this foreground this uh background here so my tools today are isopropyl alcohol it's uh this particular is 91% that dries very very rapidly so it lets you get back in and start the painting process again if you have 70% or some other percent it's not important it just means that the lower the percentage the longer it's going to take to to dry now I've got two brushes this is just a little cheap chip brush that comes from uh a local Big Box hardware store we will not give them a free plug you know who they are in your neighborhood this is a cheap hobby brush I buy them by the sets for Just5 $6 you get I don't know 10 to 20 brushes like this so this will maybe after the alcohol does its thing I can go in so there's my tools if I add another tool it'll be a surprise to me and you but I'll try to mention it this is about a 10x10 on Ur paper so this is the area I want to try to do something with so I am going to saturate my brush and get it drippy soppy wet like this because when I destroy this area I want that alcohol to run down the surface and that will create hopefully some areas that I can follow as Tree Trunks and I may come into here I'm not real happy with this area so let's just see if we can get some things happening across there now you see I can take my smaller brush and while this is wet I can move some things around and make some of these connections and branches that are in our Landscapes I can vary the size because the drips you know a lot of times so this was two little tree trunks and now I've turned it into one with a crotch in the tree and we create some interest up in these areas here with some branching trees and trees will have branches that go out over other branches and we'll try to create some of those connections too and again that's just a little cheap uh watercolor brush from hobby store this sanded paper will eat up your brushes in a heartbeat so do not use your good squirrels or um Siberian Sable brushes with wet pastel techniques now you can see all these areas right in here have gone down so it's like these trees are coming up in the foreground so we'll scatter we'll mix in some areas here and break up those tree trunks uh and try to give them some sort of some sort of Base to sit on and remind it's just these are just reminders that when we get back into this after it dries that those tree trunks do not come from the front of the image but already this is starting to look a whole lot more interesting it's already starting to get different layers in there and so I think when I come back and visit this then I will be able to then put the dry pastel over this and come up with something that was way more interesting than that uh really simple forr Middle Ground distant trees and Sky image that we had and you can just paint in this is dry in here and you can paint in you know if you do enough plain air painting and you do enough uh painting on location or even from photographs you can do memory work on trying to just suggest where layers of trees go on over one another and then that allows you to just put these uh layers in there and then you can firm them up after you're working with the dry pastels branches come in up from a a tree that's in this part those branches can go out over those tree trunks so you can suggest some of those things and they become like little notes that you can follow when you are back into it with dry pastels so using this small little hobby brush even though the pastel has dried you can come in here and you can create layers of Limbs going over certain trees areas these trees will be in the foreground those will be behind it so as you know little branches sometimes come down these little notations of putting them across like this are just almost like shorthand so that when you go back into this painting you can say okay oh yeah this this is in front of those back there and that sort of thing and then we can make some changes here and get rid of these Tree Trunks going down just to remind us that we need a compositional element to move the eyes back in through that painting the drips and the ghosts left by the wet techniques I then added more stronger colors and used some of those compositional ideas that I expressed and I've created a much more interesting picture than what we've started before this is only about 75 80% done but in comparison to what we started with this has the start of way more interest than before we started that's it that's a way to use wet pastel techniques after a painting is already started and you see how there's these ghosts that come down as you drip the materials down in a controlled destruction process and you can create new elements and new things in your pastels if you are enjoying these videos and getting something out of it please hit the Subscribe button below and if you want to know when the new videos are posted I try to do them weekly but you'll get a notification in your email box so until next time happy painting everybody be uh well and happy and enjoy your painting process because that's what it's all about if you don't enjoy it then it becomes work and that's no fun so until next time so long if you're enjoying these videos and you're getting something out of it please hit the subscribe

Channel: Avon Waters - pastel artist

Views: 2,188

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Id: 5jqgJdtVQwg

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024