At our June 25, 2006 annual potluck meeting, Fong Ling graced us with a pastel painting demonstration.

For a still life, start with something simple, like onions that have wonderful color variation and that won’t spoil quickly. To get an interesting composition, group and vary the positions of each object relative to the others and turn each to best show their differences.

For this demonstration, Fong Ling chose a color of Canson pastel paper that would “pop” her subject and taped it onto Fomecore. You could use any other smooth surface board.
For traveling convenience, Fong Ling had split each NuPastel stick in half and separated them into each half of the NuPastel box. This gave her two sets of 96 NuPastel half sticks!

Fong Ling pulls out all the colors she plans to use in her painting before she starts to paint. This makes it easier for her to grab the right color. Speaking of which, she says to try exaggerating your color — make it brighter, deeper, more intense to give it a heightened reality.

THE DEMO:

Fong Ling first sketched in her composition loosely with vine charcoal.

Then she painted in a mid-value intense orange — using heavy pressure to get deep intense colors and light pressure for less intensity. She places each color wherever she sees it in her still-life at one time.

A word of caution, she says, is to use black sparingly, since it doesn’t reproduce well in 35mm slides. Where you may want to add black would be under the onions. This darkness in the shadow area will help ground the onions and prevent them from “floating.” Blue or green layered over the black create more colorful shadows. They also aid in receding and rounding the onions. Their coolness contrasts with the overall warm colors of the onions and adds “tension” and visual vibration, adding interest to the painting. Fong Ling lays down a blue in the shadows, saying that if she doesn’t like it, she’ll add a soft green or another color to make it softer, not so harsh.

Putting in highlights.

Determine where the areas of shadow are on the onions and where the light hits them. She likes adding a light green to the onion skin to accentuate highlights. Detail is added last with the edge of the pastel stick.

She admits that she doesn’t know what she’s going to do next. She just tries to paint what she sees and what she feels and always tries to remember what Helen (Iaea) says — step back occasionally to look at the overall painting. Doing this gives her insight to what may need to be done with either her painting or her still-life arrangement, which she'll change if she finds that it isn’t working out.

Working quickly allowed Fong Ling to remain loose and spontaneous, which gave her painting that professional painterly look.