My New Favorite Painting Technique

'Deep Purple Haze'           8x10         pastel          ©Karen Margulis
available $150

 I get on these kicks sometimes. I try something on a whim and I like the results.....and the process. So I want to do more! I am on a texture kick this week. The one thing that is somewhat difficult to do with pastels is to create raised texture. Think palette knife paintings done with oil and acrylic. I love the look and feel of thick paint. It suits some subjects so well.

Thick texture is a challenge with pastels but there are some workarounds! Clear gesso is a simple way to get a bit of texture in your pastel paintings.

I wrote about using clear gesso last week. I enjoyed the results so I decided to take another older failed painting and reimagine it with texture. Here is the painting. If you look closely I already trued the clear gesso trick. The painting was just 'meh'. It needed a new life and of course I saw lavender growing in the filed!

The older painting that needed some help

Look at the photo below for a close up look at the texture created by another layer of clear gesso. What the clear gesso does is liquifies the pastel making dark mud. That dark mud gives me a nice rich base of 'dirt' so I can plant my lavender.

In this painting I made linear marks in the gesso with a brush handle while the gesso was wet. It really added to the texture! Be sure to use CLEAR gesso and not regular white gesso. The clear has a bit of grittiness to it that regular gesso does not have.

close up detail of the texture.