How to Use and Blend Color for Your Chalk Drawing

Mary DAmico: Hi! My name is Mary DAmico and I am private art instructor and I am here working with one of my students Summer. We are working on a chalk pastel drawing focusing on a Still Life, and what I would like to go over now is the different pastel techniques that we can use to place in our drawing. So, there is various different kinds of chalk pastels that we can use that either come in a pencil form or more like a chalk blocks. So, depending on whatever you prefer I will show you both of them, today. First technique, I am going to go over is the using the side of the pastel. So, you just basically taking a pastel and very lightly going across the page, and you will see a bit of the paper underneath when you do use the side of the pastel. Next technique is using the end of the pastel; the end of the pastel has more a square shape to it. So, we can just, if you wanted to have lines going across the page. The point of the pastel is kind of pastel that has more of a pointed edge after you have used at a while, and you can get a thinner line. This might be a good technique if you are drawing grass or trying to add detail or texture to an object. Our next technique is using short strokes. So, I am just going to again take the point of the pastel and just dab my pastel on the page, and I can overlap that with another color, you can use two colors to create depth or dimension or if you would like to create a pattern. This technique can also be used if you are drawing an animal and you have the hair of the animal. Next, we can use the long strokes very similar; we are just drawing and using the pastel across the page of it more.

We go in different directions, we can crosshatch over our lines, okay. Varying pressure, pressure is how much you press on to the paper. So, the harder I press, the more darker the color is going to be and the less I press its going to be lighter. So, you get a good gradation of color, dark green to light green and it fades. One thing we want to be careful of and this is safety is if we do press hard, we are going to see that we create some chalk dust on to our paper. We want to make sure that you do not blow the dust into the air. We can just leave it there for now, because we dont want, we want to make sure that we dont get the dust into the air or we can just use a cloth or tissue and wipe it away. Our next technique will be blending two colors. So, what you are going to do is use the side of the pastel and we can just overlap another color, over the top to create a pink that has a little bit more than orange in it, this maybe something good that you will use if you were coloring in the sky. So, it just continue to overlap the colors, and then we are blending with the cloth. So, we are doing the same thing, just going to overlap the colors and you can use a tissue or if you do have a cloth for this and we are just going to go from the edge of the color and kind of go in a circular motion as we have blend our colors, and you get a much softer look with using a cloth. Okay, and also what I have on here is using complimentary colors. When we are using complimentary colors and we want to think about how we can create a color being darker, and we are going to move on to showing how to add light and shadow for color and if we have a color thats red, we dont really want to add black to it, because it will dull out the color and take away the brightness. So, the compliment of red will be green, and you are going to see this a little bit later when we want to make red a darker red, we can use green to blend in the show and so on as we go through the rest of our colors. Orange will be paired with blue, and yellow will be paired with purple, and now we are ready to move on to our drawing that we have ready and use our pastel technique to that color to our Still Life drawing.