Artists Back to Basics - Issue 6 Volume 3 2016

“Drawing with Big Lumps

of Colour- Part 2”

by Brett A. Jones

A

fter a lifetime of waiting for the

chance (and time) to delve

deeply into pastels I finally got

serious a few years or so ago and

made the deliberate moves necessary

to get the ball rolling. For me that

meant setting myself up materially to

start with and then finding someone

appropriate to smash some solid

knowledge about pastel technique

and methods into my box head,

with as brutal a learning curve as

possible as I really couldn’t let lumps

of colour interfere with or supplant

the ever growing and ongoing

commitment to the 2B graphite.

A Place to Start

I just wanted a solid place to begin

so I could take it from there whenever

I saw the slightest gap in the time

cloud. I had always intended to

drag as much of my existing style of

freehand drawing as possible over

to the coloured dust but knew there

must be basic pastel fundamentals

I just didn’t know. I believe a lot of

things are “meant to be” and often fall

into place if instinct is followed blindly

and it certainly turned out that way for

me in the case of pastels. I had just

finished setting up my O.C. version

of a pastel set-up and looked up and

around to find the very highly regarded

McGregor School (Toowoomba

University) was for the first time ever

doing what they called “McGregor

in the Bay”(at Hervey Bay University)

and one of the 5-day courses was

for advanced pastels. I couldn’t

believe my luck. The instructor was

an incredibly talented freehand pastel

artist from Melbourne called Barbara

McManus. I was being very cheeky

signing up for such a thing when up till

then I had never touched a pastel to

paper in my life. I think Barbara was

a bit lost for words when she saw the

virgin snow of 200 brand new pastels

all in rows with the name, catalogue

number and colour swatch next to

each one. I told her I hadn’t wanted

to touch them at all until someone told

me what the go was with such things.

She asked me what I was doing here

Fig 1: The first ‘unholy mess’ stage.

Reference photo on board to the left.

Fig 2: Not trying at all hard to “get it right”,

rather just blocking in rough underpinnings.

Fig 3: As more blocks of colour

are laid in the larger constituent

parts start to settle into place.

Fig 4: Being able to push both

positive and negative spaces around

with abandon is very liberating.

Fig 1

Pencils Down