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Painting with pastels is something I love and have experimented with for more than fifteen years and it's well worth my journey.

Today's blog is about pastel underpaintings. I personally love all underpainting techniques and teach in my workshops the pros of starting a painting with this technique. I was first introduced to this concept by artist Albert Handel in one of his videos and then by Richard McKinney when I attended his plein air workshop, I have never looked backed.

OK so let's dive right into the process of underpaintings. The process uses any water based medium such as watercolors, acrylics or even alcohol with pastel sticks. To try and explain all the different techniques would be too long in this blog so to get you motivated just do a online search Pastel underpainting techniques and you will find ton of videos and articles to start your journey. Also, I highly recommend taking a workshop to get on hand instruction. To understand why an underpainting can make your pastel paintings more successful you need to understand a few basic concepts of using pastels. Pastels are painted dark to light as in oil painting however the difference is you can't keep applying pastels over and over on the surface without compromising the tooth of the paper. When painting with pastels one rule I adhere to is not to paint darks over lights as it will dull the passage. This is where an underpainting can help, once dried it is set and will not lift off, you can place darker colors on top of lighter colors without dulling the passage. Brilliant!

Now, take a look at my underpainting, I laid my middle ground rocks as my darkest value there was a reason for this. I wanted darker value in that area so I could paint in all of my wonderful light values to define the rock shapes. If I had gone too light in the underpainting I would have had to go back and forth adding more darks and then adding lights to define the forms. Sounds like a lot of work, well it is. Same goes with the light value in the wave, I purposely painted it lighter so I could introduce middle to darker values to create form. If I had painted that too dark it would have been harder to lighten that area up and then put darker values on top.

There are times where the underpainting will be just the perfect value and very little pastel will be needed on top. As in my  foreground area, all I did was add the foam and a few strokes of lighter value.

The real secrets to underpaintings are you are learning and understanding values and overtime your painting skills will improve and your underpaintings are doing a lot of the work for you. I call that a win-win!

Another secret is using  grays in your underpaintings, your colors on top will sing.... well that's for another blog.

As always experiment learn and enjoy-  Colorfully yours, Linda