More Tips for Painterly Grasses

'Discovery'            9x12          pastel over oil stain         ©Karen Margulis
available $165

It is so easy to paint stiff grass.  You know the kind I am talking about. Grassy areas that look too manicured. Grasses that look rigid and unnatural. The difficulty comes about because we tend to paint grasses the way we think they are ...the symbol in our brains for grass often resemble a green grassy fence.(think of how a child draws grass)  We don't always look as carefully as we should.  So my first bit of advice is to be observant and pay attention to the colors and movement of the grasses.  Here are someother tips to help you paint more 'painterly' grasses.

My chart of ideas for painting grasses

•  Avoid painting individual blades of grass. Think instead of the big underlying shapes or blocks of grass. Pull out and paint a few blades. Allow the viewer to participate and fill in the rest. A few well placed blades will read as grass.

• Using the long edge of a soft square pastel use the press and lift method to leave a print of a piece of grass. Do a few but be careful not too have them spaced too evenly or all marching in the same direction.

• Use the top edge of a harder round pastel and roll it leaving a broken line of grass.

• Lay down a block of color and then draw some lines of grass with a thin hard pastel. Draw a SENSITIVE line. Have a light responsive touch so the line isn't to thick or regular. Practice sensitive lines.

• Paint on a heavily textured surface. Glide the pastel over the texture and it will look like grasses without putting in a blade!

• Underpainting! I like to use an alcohol, turpenoid or oil stain and allow the drips to create the grasses.

This is an oil stain underpainting. The wonderful drips
make great grasses! In my painting I tried not to cover up all of the drips.

A Simple Tip for Painting Grasses

'Meadow Riot'         5x7        pastel        ©Karen Margulis
available $50

When it comes to painting grass I can always use a good tip. So often grass comes off stiff and unnatural in a painting. Since I love painting scenes with lots of grass and tangles of weeds I am always looking for ways to refine the way I paint them. 

 I have several ways I like to paint grass. All of them designed to prevent the grass from becoming a stiff 'fence' of grass marks. This type of grass can often become a visual barrier in a painting. The viewer is prevented from entering into the painting. 

Today I am sharing one of my favorite techniques for painting grass: Negative Painting.

What is Negative Painting? Here is a definition found on the Craftsy blog:

Negative painting is a simple technique that involves applying pigment around an subject to give it definition. You'll add paint to surround the person, place or object, making it stand out because it appears lighter (or darker) than the background.

Grass on the left is painted with linear marks. Grass on the right is done with negative painting

When painting grass you can use the negative painting technique to create natural and believable areas of grass. In the example above you can see how the technique works.

•  On the left I have painted the grass by making linear marks. The grass looks too thick and regular. In the example on the right I painted a larger block of grass using two pastels on their side. I did not paint individual grass marks. 
• I then used the sky color to cut into the block of green.  I used the negative painting technique of painting what is behind the grass (the sky)  which allowed the individual blades of grass to appear.

Where else can you use Negative Painting in a landscape? It is a great way to create painterly passages in your work! Tomorrow I will share some other grass techniques.

Do You Have Grass Box?

'Memories of the South'       12x18       pastel        ©Karen Margulis
available $165

I don't know what I would do without my grass box. I know my marshes and meadow paintings would not be as interesting. I know that it wouldn't be as easy to create painterly grasses. Keeping a grass box is a new habit of mine but I don't know what I was waiting for!

What is a grass box you may be wondering?  It is a small box of pastels that I use exclusively for painting the finishing touches in any marsh or meadow painting. Any landscape that has grassy bits can be a challenge. If you paint too many grass blades or make them too thick and regular you risk creating a fence of grass. A grass fence is a visual barrier. It can prevent the viewer from entering or moving back into a painting. A grass box makes it easy to always paint lyrical grasses.

My collection of grass pastels along with a small banker's clasp used for scratching grass marks in soft pastel passages.

What is in my grass box?

• Some harder pastels such as Nupastels and Rembrandts. These pastels have more binder than softer pastels so they make a crisper mark.
• Some harder Russian pastels given to me by a friend. These harder and round sticks make wonderful painterly grasses.
• A variety of earthy colors for both green and dried grass. I add to this box when I find a grass color that I can't I've without!
• A few 'spicy' greens...greens that are intense for those special bits of eye candy.
• A metal Banker's Clasp that can be used to scratch grass marks into a passage of thick pastel.

Having a box of pastels that work well for those finishing marks in a grassy area is a useful tool but it also helps to practice making effective and lyrical grass marks. You may be interested in my blog article on painting grass here:http://kemstudios.blogspot.com/2016/02/more-on-painting-grasses-with-pastels.html

Painting Notes: This is one of the demo paintings I did for my recent workshop with the Piedmont Pastel Society. It is on Uart pastel paper with an alcohol wash underpainting.

Try This: An Interesting Technique for Painting Grass with Pastels

'Hidden Marsh'      12 x 18        pastel           ©Karen Margulis
available $165

It was all about the texture. One of my favorite things about my foray into the world of oils was the ease of creating texture. I crave texture in my pastel paintings. I do what I can to give the illusion of texture. Building layers of increasingly soft pastel and working on a prepared textured surface are just two ways.  But what about on regular sanded paper such as Uart?  Sometimes I want more physical texture!

Yesterday I was doing laundry when something on the shelf caught my eye. It was a tube of Gel n Dry medium from Sennelier.  Bill Creevy used it during his IAPS workshop several years ago. I bought a tube but never used it much. It was time to take it out and see what would happen!

Unfinished demo that needs help

I had the perfect candidate for the experiment. It was an unfinished demo from my Chicago Uart workshop. It was a quick demo to illustrate the effect of underpainting colors. It had decent bones but needed help. It needed texture in the marsh grasses!

Giving Sennelier Gel n Dry Medium a try

 I squeezed out some of the Gel n Dry into a container and with an old bristle brush applied the medium to the foreground grassy areas.  It wet the pastel and made it much darker and richer.  I brushed the medium on with random brushstroke. The soft pastel became like paint. I then used the end of the brush handle to draw lines into the wet pastel. I could see the brush handle cut through the pastel leaving tracks. I was getting physical texture!

After the Gel n Dry

I let the painting dry overnight. I am not sure how long it actually took to dry but it was at least 3 hours so this is not a quick technique. It was nice and dry in the morning and my unmounted Uart paper was perfectly flat. The wet medium had no effect on the paper which is good to know.

I reworked the painting adding layers of green and peach pastel over the grassy areas. I was excited to see the pastel stick to the raised areas leaving the dark values in place. I had raised pieces of grass courtesy of Gel n Dry. Cool!

Pastel on top of the grooves left by the Gel n Dry medium

more textured grass