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Do you think a pastel painter needs thousands of pastel sticks to be able to paint? Not entirely so.

Recently I took up a challenge to paint with 12 colours plus black and white, and someone commented that it looked very much like my usual painting style, so where was the challenge?

Hm, yes, that was after all basically true.

The Challenger had painted with only three colours (+ black and white), so I took him up on that.

Don't tell him, but I did choose to design the scene so it would fit the very limited number of colours...

As I worked on a fairly darkish paper, I knew I would get better results with toning the light areas with white before starting. And then I chose black to darken the dark areas. The black and white underpainting makes a huge difference. It (the finished sketch) would have been more colourful if I had used the colours for the underpainting. But I prefer to have whites and blacks under the colours.

The turning fish is my chosen area of interest. But it doesn't stand (swim!) as an isolated blob in the midst of darkness. I have hinted at things growing, and things being reflected in the surface, so there is a visual path, a movement, combining the fish and the other light elements in the painting.

Now, why do people maintain that a pastel painter really needs thousands of sticks?

I have two theories about that: a) people think it is easier to search for just the right stick of just the right nuance, and b) if one starts painting with pastels, one has not learned to mix colour in a wet medium.

My personal answer to a) is that it can be quicker to modify the colour you have with another colour, and it is easier to carry a more limited palette. To b) I suggest some serious work mixing colours and learning how they behave. I started painting in oils, and did extensive studies of colour mixing. There are no quick fixes, knowledge must be earned by hard work.

So three colours work for pastel painters too. Admittedly, it isn't easy, but that palette of 14 sticks in the previous blog post are quite enough. OK, I'd like to expand on that, a little bit, for convenience's sake. But still, some 30 sticks are nowhere near the two thousand some recommend.

Good news! Sketches and studies -- and experiments -- have a new section on my website, and they are half the price of finished paintings!

Does a painter need drawing skills too?

Painting in the manner of modern impressionism is a very different approach from drawing (at least the way drawing is usually taught). You certainly need some drawing-skills, but what is most important is to learn to judge relationships (which of course one does in drawing too). Painting with colour involves relationship of colour, of value, of relative warmness/coolness of colour, brightness/dullness, etc. And you go from large to small, 'sculpting' shapes and form with colour. A flat underpainting is sculpted into seeming to have a three-dimensional shape, by adding colour to what you already have on paper/canvas.

Small to big
There are several methods of drawing, and most of them involve drawing edges as lines, and then shading to let value create form. Drawing, one exercises a careful attention to details, right from the start. Certain schools advocate drawing one eye carefully, and then spreading out from it, using the completed eye as an anchor against which one measure the rest of the features.

Big to small
Painting goes from general large shapes to successively smaller corrections. So the thinking is sort of the other way around. No bogging down in details at the outset, volume before details, details almost an afterthought.

Excellent book on drawing
Some teachers teach another method of drawing that is compatible with, and very similar to, the thinking behind painting. One such very good teacher is Carl Purcell, who gives a great course in his book “Drawing with your Artist’s Brain”. See it at Amazon.

Old “truths”
The academies of the 1700s and 1800s really hammered in what they perceived to be the truth -- "you can't paint if you can't draw". So students spent one to three hours on drawing before allowed to paint. This is still taught as a truth.

Need to know
There are other schools of thought. One that I'm particularly fond of is: "you learn what you need to learn when you feel the need to learn it" -- and then you yourself actively search for the knowledge which makes sense in the context of the whole, and which improves your ability to 'say' what you want to say with your art.

Would you?
Let’s say you’re fascinated by colour and feel a burning desire to paint. Would you really want to spend 3 years only drawing in graphite or charcoal before being allowed to use a brown and a white too? Or would you like it better if you were to get a box with gorgeous colour, experimenting, playing, and painting. When you discovered that you don’t know how to draw an oval, and that you really would like to be able to paint a portrait where the person is recognizable as a human being – would you then feel motivated to learn good drawing skills? I ask, because it is not a given. We have different methods and manners of acquiring knowledge and skills. What I’ve described is my personal preference.

Certainly
In this method of painting that I work with, we often start with a simple “skeleton” drawing, consisting of the outlines of the silhouettes of the largest masses, divided into light masses and shadow masses. Monet didn’t even do that, he just went in straight with loosely scribbled colour, searching out the shapes. But oh yes, drawing skills are still needed, and are intrinsic to painting skills.