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| 'Back to Iceland' 9x12 pastel ©Karen Margulis available here $160 |
The colors looked wonderful in the box. What's not to love about beautiful pure color? But when I used them to block in my painting I had a scary mess. Well it certainly looked like mess but I actually had a method to my madness. I had a plan but I needed to see if my idea would actually work. It sure was an ugly underpainting!
It was an experiment using a limited selection of a pastel brand that I had not yet tried. I can't even remember when I got this set of Charvin Water Soluble Pastel Painting Sticks. They looked and felt like a hard pastel stick with the claim of being useful for wet and dry painting. You can use them on damp paper or create washes with them. I decided to try them with a water wash underpainting.
The issue was the color selection in my box. They were all intense pure middle value colors. I usually like to do a value based underpainting and these sticks didn't allow for much of a value change. So I layered colors with the plan to create colorful grays. My subject was a cool moody cloudy scene from my 2014 trip to Iceland. I needed some colorful grays to paint the moody sky. The colors looked scary until I wet them with water.
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| Water wash on top of the Charvin pastels |
As I wet the brush and mixed the layers of color the magic began. I was surprised at the wonderful drips that started to happen and the way the colors mixed and mingled. My underpainting was taking on a life of it's own. I saw some compositional issues that I needed to adjust (horizon in the middle!) and I did the correction by drawing into the wet paper with the pastel. Fun!
My unmounted Uart paper took the water wash without a problem and within an hour it was dry enough for me to continue painting with my regular soft pastels. I enjoyed working on top of the underpainting and leaving some of the colorful grays alone!
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| close-up detail |
Thank you for this post. I made the mistake of buying a box of these Charvin pastels off Amazon. I would have returned them but the really short window of doing that expired by the time I figured out how bad these pastels are. I've been looking into finding a way to use them to recoup the $20 I wasted. I would have been much better served by buying the Nupastels even if I only got 12 or 24 instead of 48 of these. They seem like they are mostly binder.
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