Establishing Pastel Background Color

Series Summary

Artists who use pastels for painting still life paintings know that one great benefit to painting with pastels is that lighter colors can be painted over darker colors. In fact an artist can change the viewer's perception of a scene or still life just by using color. An artist can create intense contrasts using complimentary colors which magnify the colors in the painting. If you would like to learn how to paint with pastels for free and online you have come to the right place.

In this free series of pastel painting lessons learn how to paint still life paintings with pastels from expert artist Dan'L Terry. Dan'L will demonstrate how to add background color in pastel paintings, refine edges with pastel background colors, frame a pastel still life, paint dark tones with pastels, and paint middle values with pastels. He will teach you how to use fixative on pastels, how to use complimentary colors, and how to unify objects in a still life pastel painting. Have fun learning this extraordinary skill!

Video Transcript

"Ok. I've established a background of light green. I want to go lighter and when I look at that I also see that there's a lot of yellow and a lot of white in there. So I'm going to move to a yellow and I'm just going to start refining some of these shapes. This being, and I'm just going to start hatching in, over the green that we've already got, a texture using a crosshatching technique to give this green a lighter value and to create some textural surfaces at the same time to bring up the value of the green in the background, and you'll notice that what's happening is there's some blending going on, and from your perspective, your eye is going to blend some of these colors together optically in such a way that your eye will do the work of making this a single color because it wants to see it as a solid color. We'll come back in and we'll do some more of this later with more hatching and with more color, but this is basically the process that will let us start to create the shape and refine these forms in such a way that it becomes an interesting painting."