Pastel session

Some artists reveal their secrets, I found a mentor in Ardèche, Provence : Marie-Hélène YERNAUX, with whom I spent a fantastic week rediscovering pastel technique.

Regular progress shots allows me to relate the following step by step:

First of all, we work on a wide piece of paper (in this case, a deep gray Pastelmat), that allows free gesture and testing the colors around the edges of the sheet. The drawing is treated for a realist rendering.

We proceed by working on the values of the drawing with a white chalk first. It is important to apply a light touch here, least we saturate the paper, as we will be adding layers progressively.

Using only two colour crayons, yellow and red in this case, we give the scene a predominantly warm hue. The lighter tones are simply obtained through the previous layer of white.

Then we use complimentary colours for the shadows. Starting here with violet…

We now work on the luminosity aspect by glazing with very light yellow, pink, and cyan pastels.
At this point we are leaving the realm of drawing and blend gradually the colors together withs fingers. Volumes are finally emerging.

Soft pastels are now added within the same tonality range, this highlight underlying colors.
In this way, with a very limited number of pastels colours, we are able to interpret reflections, transparency and brightness.

Privacy notice

We do not use cookies or store any sort of persistent identifying information in your computer. We do not rely on any third parties who do, either, with the exception of Stripe, our payments processor. Please review their privacy policy for more details. We do however try to minimise their impact: Stripe code will only load on the artwork pages and will only become active when you start filling in the purchase form for artwork.

We do not use any form of tracking or “analytics” technology. The Stripe code described above does not share any tracking data with us.

If you write or call us, we will use your contact details and other information that you may have given us exclusively for the purpose of supplying the information or services that you request and for discharging our legal and contractual duties. In no event will your information be sold or passed on to third parties, outside of the cases stipulated by the law, without your prior authorisation.

When you make a purchase via this site, you provide us with some personal information, notably your name, email address, postal address or addresses, and telephone number. That information is stored at the site of our payments processor, Stripe. We need that information in order to fullfil our contractual obligations with you (sending you your newly acquired artwork and your invoice) and that is all we use it for.

We do not have access to your payment details. All we can see is: the last four digits of your credit / debit card, its type (Visa, Mastercard, …), expiration date, country of issue, and whether or not it has passed certain security checks (but not the data used in such checks).

You may exercise your rights of access, modification, portability and deletion of your personal data by contacting us, preferrably in writing.