advantage. It’s still a painful ordeal but
so’s waking up in the morning, putting
the brain in gear and letting the clutch
out. Being able to play with big lumps
of colour makes up for a lot of pain.
Hoy in, Scruff it off, and Go Again
There seems to be a more and more
common practice nowadays of starting
a pastel by carefully transferring (by
whatever means) the outlines and more
obvious details of the composition
or object onto the pristine pastel
paper and then adding colour to one
section at a time in a very measured
and precise way with much careful
touching, smudging, and blending with
the fingers and blending tools as part
of the process. I just don’t see it that
way (you’re allowed to roll your eyes
and make Marge Simpson sounds at
this point, see you back here in a few
seconds). I believe the whole process
should be done completely freehand
right from the overloose hell for leather
initial layout. In fact, as the venerable
Barbara McManus says, “go right
out of your way in the initial stages to
put the foundational stages of colour
right out of place to create an effect
of all the colours appearing in the
composition appearing throughout the
work. Leonardo Da Vinci maintained
that all colours directly affected and
were reflected in all the other colours
in every compositional situation and
must always be taken into account
when creating artwork. I’ve always
held the same view, I remember when
I was a little kid staring out the window
at school realising that every single
molecule of matter and photon of
light must affect every other particle
around it. Light pushes reality around,
so does colour. The shapes and
proportions inherent in the infinite array
of choices that need to be made by
the artist in the course of creating any
piece of original freehand fine art is
one of the very things that makes it
such a magical and esoteric journey
of the human spirit. I love the graphite
but drawing with pastels ups the
ante in some ways with the addition
of the colour spectrum. It also lets
me explode joyously into sketchy
freedom with the rainbow of blunt
lumps, as opposed to the terror ride
of freehand drawing everything from
the brightest highlight right down to
the subtlest texture hyper-realistically
with a needle point of 2B graphite.Anyone can play, all you need
are some pastels(figure 11),a
brain, some eyeballs and hands
and away you go. Why would you
not? Why would anyone not? ■Fig 9 Fig 10Fig 11