Susan Kerrigan-Harris gave us a wonderful demonstration of animal drawing in pastels in April.

Interestingly, she works in sections to finish rather than layers. Her thought is that if she did layers and got to a state where she liked it a lot, she wouldn’t want to work on it further. Doing sections that she’s really pleased with motivates her to move onto the next section and bring that to the same level.

The key to doing animals: fur direction. Use strokes, feathering, sides of pencils ‘glazing’ for different effects. Hold pencils at far end for lightness of stroke.

Sue uses pastel mat for good tooth, but lightly to move pastel around—harder strokes will stay in place. Torchons are very useful, but you can get rubber blenders but also all sorts of plastic used for other things!

She has a blog post on website which talks about her favourite colours. Purple and dark green are very useful in fur; complementary colours really add depth.

Which pastels?

You can and should mix pastel pencils with pastel sticks. Don’t get confused between pastel pencils (which can be pricey) and cheaper pastel-coloured pencils. Those won’t work well with pastel sticks.

Isopropic alcohol can be painted on dark spots to fix (aka surgical spirit). This melts the pastel and locks it into the paper, but it will bleed, so take care. It also makes your paper darker.

Pastel papers are very varied, you just have to find what you like.

More on materials

Fixative is an art, she doesn’t use it. She did use hairspray at school and it worked well.

With something like pastel mat, get on the mailing list of someone like GreatArt, and buy large sheets when it’s on sale… sheets you cut to the size you want are far more affordable than pads.

You can also reuse it, wash it off, dry flat….

Pencil sharpeners

When sharpening pencils… Sue has a video on YouTube. Ordinary sharpeners, including the big ones with handles, go blunt too quick. For pastels, use a knife/blade and then scrub on sandpaper to get to a point, sandpaper on its own will probably do.

Sue traces the underdrawing. As she wrapped up the evening she told us an anecdote about a well known artist who uses a lot of different techniques to get the basic structure down. “Anything goes in getting the basics right!”

Thank you for an excellent and entertaining demo. The list of Sue’s materials will be added soon.