Painting Made Easy

A Professional Guide For Every Artist

Mike Chaplin

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781398800212
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Starting from the premise that we all want to make marks to record the world around us, this book aims to give basic guidelines that will help anyone to express themselves through different media but especially watercolours, oils and pastels. Professional artist Mike Chaplin demonstrates that anyone can paint if they are taught the necessary techniques in a simple and structured way. The book features:
• Essential skills and techniques presented in an accessible way
• Structured tuition, beginning with basic markmaking and how to make the transition from drawing to simple watercolours
• Stand-alone sections on watercolours, oils and pastels incorporating guidance in the processes that are fundamental to each medium
• Projects to inspire and encourage

Pastels

With their vibrancy and immediacy, pastels are an exciting medium to use. They also hark back thousands of years, for Neolithic artists made their cave paintings using the same techniques of applying pure pigments to a surface that still hold good today. In more recent centuries, you can find them in Renaissance drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and in Edgar Degas’ famous depictions of ballerinas at the end of the 19th century. They are the medium that many artists have reached for when they have wanted to express spontaneity and movement, with strong, pure colours.

Pastels are quite difficult to use, and their intense colours need careful handling. The grains of the pigment will always remain separate, so you cannot mix colours together as is possible with paint. Nor can you thin the colours down to make lighter tones. You can only make a pastel lighter or darker than it inherently is by scumbling one colour on top of another to make a mix that will be perceived by the eye as being a single colour. So, unlike watercolour where you can buy just a few pigments to begin with, with pastels you are faced with over 200 pigments to choose from – and each is available in five different tones.

Consequently, pastel can seem daunting for the beginner, and the aim in this book is to guide you through the early steps of mastering its use. It is a wonderfully direct and expressive medium that encourages you to work large and bold, and as such it may transform your work in other mediums too.

Drawing tools

Manufacturers offer pastels in about 200 colours, and since it is not possible for the artist to reduce the tone as is done with paint, each of the colours is available in five different tones from light to dark. In practice you will probably find three adequate, but this still leaves the beginner with a bewildering choice. Fortunately, useful starter sets are available, some of them including a brush, an eraser, some paper and a pencil sharpener. Starter sets are usually designed for a particular purpose, such as one for figures which has a range of flesh tones or a landscape selection with a choice of greens. To make pastels, the pigment is mixed with binder in a vat. It is then extruded like spaghetti and chopped into short lumps or compressed into moulds, which produce much harder pastels. The latter are best for tight drawing with hard edges, while the soft ones are ideal for scumbling rich areas of colour. Hardest of all are pastel pencils, which have a wood casing.

Watercolour pastels and pencils are in effect watercolour paints, while oil pastels are compressed oil colour. They are a means of applying paint conveniently put into a drawing medium.

Charcoal is available in various grades, from hard to soft, and in thin wands or thick stumps. It is usually made from willow, but you can even draw with barbecue charcoal if it has not been treated with lighter fuel. It is messy to use but produces wonderfully rich velvety b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Drawing
• Watercolours
• Pastels
• Oils
• Copyright