Painting Lavender on Canson Paper

'Summer days in Provence'          9x12          pastel         ©Karen Margulis
available $165

I am running low on paper. I am back home in the studio and ready to paint but my paper supply is limited. My go to paper is Uart and somehow I only have one piece left. So I decided today to use some of the other papers I have on hand. I pulled out a pad of Canson Mi-Teintes paper and found a piece of my favorite Canson color....Moonstone.

I actually love to paint on Canson Mi-Teintes paper and I have blogged a lot about it. On my Patreon page we are exploring pastel supplies this month and Canson MT is the paper of the week. I decided to do a step by step demo of this painting for Patreon. You can see the entire demo there www.patreon.com/karenmargulis  Here is a sneak peek song with some Canson tips:

The pastels I used for the demo

Here is the start of the painting on Canson Mi-Teintes moonstone

TIPS FOR WORKING ON CANSON MI-TEINTES PAPER

• Try the smooth side. The correct side is the bumpy side but if you don't like the regular text turn the paper over and work on the smooth side. I always work on the smooth side.
• Use a light touch. Be sure you can still see the paper or the previous layer. This way you know you have a light enough touch.
• Start with harder pastels so you don't fill the tooth of the paper too quickly but do use some softer pastels on the final layers.
• Consider using workable fixative during the painting process to build more layers.
• Some artists like to use sand paper to lightly rough up the paper before painting.
• Make use of the colored papers by choosing a color that you can allow to show through. This way you can plan on using less pastel layers in your painting. ( I love how Moonstone unifies a painting. I don't have to cover it all up!)
• Canson also comes in a mounted board. This board only allows you to use the bumpy textured side. 
• Canson Mi-Teintes doesn't do well with wet underpinnings. Some artists have success with light alcohol. I don't use it for wet underpaintings. You can get Canson Touch which is a sanded version of the paper.