Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I am looking forward to spring. As beautiful as snow can be, I'm ready for warmer weather. I bought an Alla Prima pochade box, which are made to order, and it was ready at the end of last summer so I didn't get to use it much. I know some brave souls paint en plein air in the winter, but between the MS and the temperature, I shake too much to be very useful then. Although, it could be interesting to see how a picture when I'm in that state turns out. Hmmm. Maybe I will try that at some point. Regardless, I am excited to finally be able to break it in properly. It's beautifully made and I am almost loathe to stain it up, but as Ben Haggett, the creator of these fine boxes says, they are tools and tools are made to be used. I am more than ready to heed his advice!



The paint tubes are all paints I made myself, with the exception of the Cobalt Blue (Vasari) which I just retubed into something smaller. The rest are all hand-ground by me. I plan on doing a blog post in the near future with pictures about how I make my paint so check back soon!

I'd like to start by saying thank you to everyone who gave me their support. It meant so much to me, even if I wasn't able to respond to everyone at the time. But now I am back to my normal self. Well...whatever normal is. The surgery went fine. The only problem was that I got down to 87 lbs. which left me awfully weak and due to the very restricted diet I had to follow, I couldn't gain anything back either.  But now that the severe restrictions have been lifted and I can eat more things, I am slowly packin' on the pounds and feeling much more functional. So once again, thank you everybody and I hope you are all feeling well and being creative!

There is a movie coming out December 5 called "Local Color" and it looks fantastic.  Check out the trailer here http://www.localcolormovie.com/ . If you like it, be sure to see it when it comes out in theaters, if you can.

and here's a lovely little short video of Caravaggio I came across http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfYMPdKPazI

Enjoy!

As is stated on the "About the Artist" section, I have multiple sclerosis and due to some complications, I am having surgery in a few weeks. I haven't stayed on top of my blog but I'm still making art...from bed! So I will have   some new things to  post as soon as I am recovered from the surgery.

Have a wonderful and happy summer and I will be back and on top of my game in a month or so.

Ciao! (for now)

In the art world, the support is what you are putting your picture on to. If you paint, it’s your canvas (or board, or whatever else you decide to paint on).  For drawing, it is typically paper, but it doesn’t have to be. For pastels, there is a whole variety of “supports”, each one having a unique effect on the medium (i.e. how the pastels look).

The most basic support would be paper. Generally for pastel, if you use paper, you don’t want the paper to be too smooth. Some roughness, or tooth, is needed to give the pastel something to adhere to. A hot-pressed illustration board may be wonderful for photo-realistic drawings, but your pastels won’t stay on it. Those are best left to graphite or ink. A popular favorite seems to be Canson Mi-Tientes. It is inexpensive and comes in quite a variety of colors.  It has a ’smoother’ and ’rougher’ side on each sheet, but even the ’smoother’ side isn’t hot-pressed smooth. Some other options might be printmaking papers such as Stonehenge, though it is quite smooth for pastel (it makes a wonderful colored pencil paper though). On option if you really want to use a smoother  type of paper is to spray it with spray fixative. Just know that if you do that, it will effect your colors, usually darkening them. There is also a chance it will produce spots. This can be avoided by being sure to not spray too close (minimum of 12 inches) and don’t spray down. Make your paper stand up vertically, either on a easel or a wall and spray sideways, never down. Also be sure to do it somewhere well ventilated as there are toxic fumes in fixative. I don’t care for fixative and prefer instead to use a sanded or ‘grit’ paper/board. That way my pigments stay fresh and don’t sink down into lower layers because they got ‘wet’ from spraying.

Sennelier makes a wonderful, unique pastel board called “LaCarte”. It has a rough texture almost like a sanded paper, but it isn’t nearly as aggressive (meaning it won’t east up your pastels the way a true sanded paper can). It is made with dried vegetable flakes glued on to an illustration board, so it won’t bend easily. The downside to LaCarte is that it CANNOT get wet. If it does, those little vegetable flakes come right off. Even if you accidentally spit while blowing away dust (an unhealthy habit for a pastelist but I know one many of us have) that little drop of spit can be enough to lift the flakes. I had to repair a portrait with gouache in a small area where the coating came off. Once that coating came off, nothing would stick to it. Luckily it was a small spot and not noticeable (also this particular one was for my mother so she didn’t mind the repair).  Had it been for a client, I would have had to start all over and it was nearly done when it happened. So a word of caution, if you use LaCarte, DON’T GET IT WET!!! I still use and love this support, I am just much more careful with it now that I learned the hard way how delicate it really is.

Some more sturdy examples of a sanded paper are Wallis (Museum grade even tolerates solvents. Some people get the professional grade wet no problem, but from what I understand the company only specifies the Museum grade as being useable for mixed media.) To me, it is too aggressive. Hence why I still use the LaCarte sometimes, despite it’s being 'sensitive’. It’s horrifying, isn’t it? That a paper can be sensitive? It’s like having an emotional boyfriend/girlfriend.  You may love them, but you have to be careful not to upset them. Some other good alternatives are Colourfix, Sansfix, Pastelbord (a sanded coating on a clayboard panel), Hanemuhle Velour (which is just what is sound like…velour paper! A dream with colored pencils too, it gives them a really soft, rich look unachievable on conventional paper), and UArt. UArt is the successor to Ersta, a favorite among pastelists who have been around a little while, but UArt is archival, whereas Ersta was not acid free. The nice thing with UArt is that it comes in 4 grits so you can chose how rough you want it. (sounds kinky!)

Wow…paper can be moody, sensitive, kinky. Who knew?

Sadly, there’s a lot more I could say about paper, but I doubt anyone is as interested in paper as I am.  If you are, then ‘cheers!’ to a kindred geek!

‘Til next time!

                                                      Pastels Aren’t Chalk!



<---chalk


We all know what chalk is; it's what your teachers used to send shivers up and down your spine. I still get goose bumps just thinking about that sound. (Like right now. I'm writing about it so obviously I'm thinking about it and I've got terrible goose bumps). Pastels aren't anything like that. It also doesn’t mean a pretty spring color. I realize that a lot of misconception about pastels comes from our use of the word to explain certain colors, which is a totally unrelated thing, but I was surprised to read a story that a juror at an art show referred to a pastel painting as a "chalk drawing". When I read that I realized how misinformed even art professionals can be.

<--- not chalk


So if we know what it isn't...what is pastel?


In art terms it can mean several things. (Even when we narrow down the definition solely to art it doesn't mean a specific thing without context. Nothing is simple, is it?). A pastel can be in reference to a finished painting (or drawing, but that a whole other topic) or it can be in reference to the medium itself. In that case it gets broken down further still, but one thing they all have in common is pigment. What holds that pigment together in a usable form is what makes them different from each other. An oil pastel is held together in a binder of linseed oil and beeswax. Much like lipstick, it has a creamy texture and can even be thinned with oil painting mediums. The downside to these is that most pastel societies and competitions (with the exception of ones specifically for oil pastels or those open to all media) will not accept them into juried shows. For that, we turn to soft pastels. There are also semi-hard (also called demi-dur) pastels such as NuPastels which have a waxy outer layer. For the sake of juried shows and exhibits, most will accept semi-hard pastels, but always check with the specific exhibit or competition to be sure.

Soft pastels have gotten a bad rap for being messy, weak, impermanent, imprecise. None of these things are true, though it certainly is true for the ones kids use in school. School pastels are made with a calcium carbonate binder which makes them..............chalk! No wonder everyone is so confused. A true artist grade pastel consists of pure artists' grade pigment, a binder such as gum tragacanth, and sodium orthophenyl phenate as a preservative. Some pastels, such as Roche and Diane Townsend Terrages, also contain pumice. The pumice acts as a means to roughen the surface being painted on, allowing the pigment to adhere more firmly.  It also allows the artist to build up more layers.  What limits the number of layers an artist can do depends on when the tooth gets fully filled in. Once the surface is smooth not much will stick, so by having the pumice included it's possible to work longer. Different supports also affect the number of layers, but that’s a topic for the next time.