Marsh Landscape Painting with Pastels

Hello there, everyone. I'm here with thevirtualinstructor.com, and in this lesson, I'm going to walk you through the process of creating a landscape, a marshy landscape, with pastels and pastel pencils on pastel matte paper. Now, this video features a trimmed-down version that was taken from six recorded live lessons that's available for members at thevirtualinstructor.com. Now, this complete lesson series, of course, is recorded in real time so that every single mark, every Part of the process is recorded. Again, you do have to be a member to access this complete lesson series. In this video, we'll touch on some of the high points and you'll see the drawing develop from start to finish. Now, if you like this video, make sure that you give it a like, and if you're new to the channel or haven't done so yet, I'll encourage you to subscribe to the channel, click on the notification bell, so you're notified when new videos are published like this one. With that being said, let's go ahead and dive into the process. For this drawing, we'll work on pastel matte paper, which is a wonderful surface for pastel applications. It has a heavy tooth, which encourages layering. And for the majority of the marks, we'll use Rembrandt pastels. But later in the process, you'll see that I also use Carbothello pastel pencils as well. We'll start at the top of the picture plane and work our way downward. This is because pastels are an opaque medium. This means that we can layer over the top of applications that we already have in place. That way we don't have to draw around parts of our background as we work our way down. So we're starting with the background, then we're working to the middle ground, and then lastly the foreground. We'll start with a few different values of blue before applying a bit of purple and pink for the clouds. For a little bit of added control and precision, you can see I'm using the edge of the pastel stick and then we'll do a bit of blending. I used my finger to blend the sky but for the more precise areas or the areas where precision is needed, I use a soft tool which is designed to be used with pan pastels but it also is an excellent tool for precision blending. Then we'll work our way down to the middle grounds who are overlapping the horizon at this point. And I'm starting with the distant trees here. First, a light yellow-green is applied before applying a darker green that's a little bit cooler. Then we'll go back with a slightly lighter yellow-green before making some of the shadowed areas even cooler with a couple of blues. Now this area of course is a little bit further away from the viewer so instead of focusing on details we're really only focusing on the shapes of color and value that we see. We understand that once we get some of the details in the foreground some of this information that we're adding early on in the process is going to make a bit more sense. You can see here I'm continuing to apply a variety of different greens. Some are a little bit muted, some are darker, and some are lighter, as we're just trying to get an idea of the shapes of color and value for these distant trees. I am adding a little bit of burnt sienna in areas. I can see hints of some of those oranges in the distance. And then we'll add a bit of shadow right along the edge of those trees with a dark gray. Then after that, we can move down again, overlapping the line of trees that we just developed with a bit of a stronger yellow. And then we'll add a bit of purple, some darker grays, a bit more of that burnt sienna before starting to establish some of the shapes for the water. And here again, we'll use the soft tool to do some precision blending. And you'll notice that I'm pulling the soft tool in the direction of the strokes that I've made for consistency. Now we'll begin adding some of those bits of grasses that exist up here on the upper part of the picture plane and we have a pretty strong shadow that makes its way across this section. So we're going to be using lots of darker grays to make those values a bit darker. Instead of using black, we're using the dark gray. Black can make an image appear flat and unnatural if used in areas that it doesn't really make a lot of sense. Since these areas are further from the viewer, we're not gonna have quite as strong dark values. We're gonna see those mostly in the foreground. So we're gonna hold on to our black for now. We still are going to develop some of the shadows though and we'll use darker greens and of course some grays for this. And as we work our way down the picture plane we'll go ahead and pull bits of the water down as well. Now of course this image features reflections in the water so as we add vertical strokes for the grassy areas we'll also pull a few strokes downward to replicate the reflections. Now you'll notice I've switched over to the Carbothello pastel pencils and I'm going to use the pencil for precision in areas where I need it. So for example this distant tree of course. We'll start with a darker brown and then we'll also put a light touch to indicate the body of the collections of leaves and then we'll hit the top edges of those with a lighter green to indicate that those areas of the tree are in light. We'll go ahead and get a little bit of blue down here in the bottom part of the picture plane, and then it's back to the upper part of the picture plane, this time adding a little bit of black. Now we're adding this black over the top of applications that we already have on the surface. So some mixing occurs and that leads to a more natural looking shadow. We'll also add a few details to these grassy areas. Again, as we're working closer to the viewer, more details are are going to be visible. And of course, to build up the depth and color, we'll use a variety of colors in this area, including a bit of that burnt sienna. And then, of course, we'll continue working our way down the picture plane, starting by blocking in the basic shapes with a dark gray, a bit of purple, and actually a bit of pink is used in this area as well before applying a bit of green over the top. Now, as we work our way down, of course, a bit more precision is required. So we're going to be working with the pastel pencils to add some of these grasses that extend out from the water, again, pulling strokes upward and also downward to create the illusion of reflections. We'll continue here with a bit of dark gray, this time I'm switching over to the black pencil right after this, adding some of the grassy bits coming out of the water, and then over the top a bit of green, and then of course we won't forget our reflections in the water as well. And here again, because we already have some pastel material on the surface, these black marks aren't quite as strong because there is just a little bit of mixing that occurs. And then of course it's time to address the grassy areas on the right side. The process is still the same here. We'll start with a dark gray, a bit of purple, and then greens and some lighter greens over the top. And then of course we can make our shadows a bit stronger with a black pencil. Now this surface will make your pencil dull very quickly. So just be prepared to make a lot of sharpenings during the process if you decide to work on this surface. We'll go ahead and fill in the darker blue all the way down to the bottom of the picture plane. We'll blend a bit of that with our fingers before adding a bit of black. Here again, we've already got some pastel material on the surface, so the result is a dark blue. And then to complete the transition, we'll add a couple of lighter blues over the top and then gently blend these applications in. Now we have a couple more grassy areas to complete, and we'll do them in a similar manner as the other grassy areas, starting with the darker values before adding the lighter values over the top. And then, of course, our reflections in the water really pull this together and make these grassy areas look more realistic and believable. And then, of course, for added strength, we'll use a black pastel, a stick pastel, and you can see how much stronger this black is compared to the pastel pencil. Just a few more pieces of the grass are visible on the left side and then there are some little bubbles and things that happen in the water. We'll add those and then blend them in and try to create a little bit more flow up the body of water. Hopefully the addition of this pulls the viewer eye into the piece and then of course after the last pastel applications are made we can gently pull the tape away revealing our pastel image of a marshy landscape. Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you were able to pick up a couple of things here and there. Remember, if you wanna take your drawing and painting skills to another level and access this complete lesson series along with all of the other recorded live lesson series, The weekly critiques, which are part of the members minute and all of the courses that we feature on a variety of drawing and painting subject matter and media, as well as the year long curriculum for visual arts teachers. 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