The Beauty of Pastel
This previous quarter at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I was enrolled in a Drawing II class. Being a graphic design major required me to take two drawing classes, and Drawing II was the more advanced of the two drawing classes I’ve taken here. As a digital artist, I was very intimidated by this class. For the first five weeks of class, we used black and white charcoal, which was a medium we frequented in my Drawing I class earlier this year, so I was used to it.
The second half of my Drawing II class was focused on color. We were introduced to pastels in our fourth in-class project. For this project, we were instructed to draw four still-life objects that my professor had set up around the room. She gave us a demonstration on how to use pastel before we attempted these drawings, and I was eager (but nervous) to get started.
I was taught to draw the outline of the object very lightly. We were using Mi Teintes paper which takes pastel really well, but it can only take so many layers. You can’t press down too hard or you won’t be able to put as many layers of color on the paper. The lighter you press with your pastel, the more color you can actually add. And something that really surprised me was that it is easier to go from dark to light than light to dark! The first layers of my work was all done with shadows and dark contour lines, and then I built the lights up on top. This was the opposite of using charcoal, since that requires you going from light to dark.
Something else that I learned from pastel is to trust the process. With both our pastel projects this quarter, my professor told us every class that our work wasn’t supposed to look good until the end and using pastels is a very long process. This definitely made sense once I finished my pastel drawings. Adding the final layer on top of everything made my pieces go from 10 to 100. I definitely had to be patient and work through many layers of color to achieve the results I wanted.
Most of the items around the classroom that we were able to choose from for our first pastel project were fruits. While I started with the lemon and the apple, once I started getting the hang of pastels, I decided to push myself to draw a bottle and a shell. Pushing myself really paid off as these are my two favorite objects of this piece, and this was the highest grade on a project I got in this class!
Our second pastel project was more personalized than the still-life project. Each student brought in a bunch of items to tape to a foamcore board. Each item I drew had significant meaning to me and represented something important to me. The Slytherin tie is there because of my love for Harry Potter, and my house pride. The lei represents my relationship with my boyfriend Michal. When we first met, he was working at Disney’s Polynesian Resort and every time I visited him at work, I got a lei. (I have a collection of almost 50 leis.) The Mickey ears represent my love for Disney and they came from another resort Michal worked at - The Grand Floridian. The teddy bear was one of my favorite toys when I was younger. The bookmark represents my love for reading. The highlighter is honoring my organization skills and color-coded daily planner. The cat collar belonged to my cat Fitz when he was a kitten. And the sock is one of mine from middle school that I can’t seem to let go of. Because all of these items meant so much to me, I had such an amazing time creating this piece and it made me so determined to get it as best as I could.
I also wanted to create a color story with this piece. Green is a central color in my life that I associate with my Hogwarts house - Slytherin, veganism, nature and traveling, and many more things that are important to me. I wanted one of the main colors to be green, and I chose to use analogous colors (colors that are next to each other on the color wheel) to create a cohesive, pleasing piece.
I wanted to push myself even further than the project’s requirements, so I used green reflective tape as well as a pink light. My professor said she had never seen any student use a colored light for this project before and that my ambition really worked.
I actually ended up loving pastel. You can achieve insanely accurate colors and values by layering, and I had so much fun playing around with the colors and expanding on my knowledge of color theory. And you don’t feel like you have to commit to any certain color. When using charcoal, for example, when you put the black down, it is hard to go lighter over it. But when using pastel, if you mess up, or put down a color you end up not liking, or even just accidentally smudge something, it is extremely easy to cover it up by adding more layers.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time working on these projects, and I am already starting to use pastel as a medium in my personal projects. One of my new favorite mediums!
