Barbara McManus Demonstration, Saturday 15th August 2015 Pastel Portrait
Barbara is a renowned pastel artist. Today she was going to do a
portrait sketch of her daughter-in-law, Rochelle. Pastel is an opaque
medium and the procedure is basically like oils: blocking in the tones
without much attention to detail, squinting to see them like a
picture with limited pixels. Getting down to detail later. Her base
colour was grey. She started with a patch of pink, no drawing, just
areas. A second patch of darker blue marked the shadowy side of the
face and the eye socket. In doing the mouth and nose she said it was
better to go against the obvious line so the strokes went horizontally
across the nose and vertically across the mouth. Variation in stroke
direction is important as always going one way in your preferred
direction will drag the viewer’s eye out of the picture. So she
turns her wrist as she goes. It is a light touch at this stage as she
doesn’t want to clog up the paper. You get a different colour when you
press hard than when you stroke lightly.
You have to be aware of layers with this medium. You are using strokes, not filling in. You have to calculate what the combined effect will be when you put the more realistic colours on later. Barbara does not rub much with her finger, she lets the eye combine the strokes, making the merge. So the net effect is quite painterly.
Having chosen a colour, while it is in your hand you should put it in at other parts of the picture to achieve a colour harmony overall.
With the eyes, pure white is not the right colour for the whites of the eye. Maybe pinky cream. Not as light as the highlight on the eyeball.
As for background, you do not want too much competition with the face. Throw a few colours around from earlier in the painting.
The beautiful model had to be considered so there were periods of twenty minutes sitting then a break. One break was for a delicious afternoon tea. People were able to get tips from Barbara during the break. It was a great afternoon. The finished portrait looked lovely with a mount around it.
Report by Colin Browne