Video: Choosing Painting Surface for Pastel Painting

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Pastel paints work well on canvas as well as watercolor paper. Learn more about the ground for pastel paints in this free pastel painting lesson from a professional artist.

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millersequine Nov 13, 2008
Great lesson...not normally found. I was just looking for pastel application and found this...will now try to make my own surface ground and underpainting color....fantastic...What a great site and will be back to view more of this instructors lessons....
millersequine Nov 13, 2008
Great lesson...not normally found. I was just looking for pastel application and found this...will now try to make my own surface ground and underpainting color....fantastic...What a great site and will be back to view more of this instructors lessons....

Video Transcript

So let's talk about the ground. The surface upon which you're going to paint. There's a number of options when it comes to a ground that you can use. Some pastel painters like to work on canvas. Others like to work on paper like this. This is watercolor paper. The key to the get the kind of paper that you really need is some kind of paper like a watercolor paper that has some tooth, some texture to it to begin with. If it doesn't have texture than the pastels can't stick to it. If it's too smooth like a smooth velum, the pastels will not be able to adhere. Other pastel painters like to work on what's called sand board. And you can buy ready made sand board through some of the bigger specialty art houses. But I tend to like to make my own, and most people that are working in pastels will work on a colored ground. That explains why we sometimes will use watercolor or acrylic paint in order to create a ground that is no longer this bright white area. Let's get some color on it, cover it up, and then you can work darks and lights against that middle ground, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to create our own sand board out of this piece of water color paper.

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Choosing Painting Surface for Pastel Painting

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