Playing with Pastels
featuring Lorenzo Chavez
Lorenzo Chavez was originally trained in oil painting, but then played around with pastels after art school. Pastels were a medium he was drawn to. He enjoyed the pigment in his hand and how wonderful the colors looked in the boxes. If you have played with pastels, you can relate. He was then introduced to a pastel palette that they teach at the American Academy of Art. Basically, you have to go through each color and make 5 values using each color and white.
“It can be easy to get into a color comfort zone when a palette is pre-mixed. After a while, you will see that there may be no growth by using the same colors. ”
This also opened the door to arranging a pastel palette because the charts are arranged in a certain order. There is a value breakdown from the darkest to lightest, from warm to cool color, and from the darkest colors on the palette (black all the way to yellow). In a way, it is pre-mixed for you like the color chart.
When Lorenzo start painting plein air, he realized how important it was to arrange his palette. He looked at the color charts and arranged them in orders of value and color families. Essentially, it was the whole complete color wheel, then values within those color wheels. Plein air painting is a huge reason to arrange our palettes. We do not have as much time to search for the color when the scene is changing in front of us each minute.
Big Horn Mt. Lupine, Pastel by Lorenzo Chavez
It can be easy to get into a color comfort zone when a palette is pre-mixed. After a while, you will see that there may be no growth by using the same colors. It is good to use new colors and change them up. There are similarities between oil and pastel artists. With oil, it seems like we start from the very foundation of color. You can do beautiful paintings with just the primary colors and you can mix a broad range. With pastels, once you mix that broad range of colors, it is hard to try a pastel with a small range of colors.
Lorenzo enjoys buttery and hard pastels. He likes to use them all. At the beginning stages of a painting, he tends to use the harder pastels because they are an easier drawing element. It does not tend to leave a lot of pigment on the surface as a soft pastel would. Once it builds up to a certain area, you can start adding softer pastels to create the illusion of texture.
Lorenzo uses a Krylon fixative spray. It tends to darken the color. The color black actually lightens, interestingly enough. He likes fixatives because it allows him to set the pastel in order to add more layers. Pastels do not dry, they are a constant medium (unless using a fixative spray). It is almost like letting an oil painting dry so you can build up layers.
Listen to Gabor and Lorenzo on the Paint & Clay Podcast today ——-> Click here.