Speaking of Art Blog

Sunflowers and Friends, pastel, 9x12"

This is my latest pastel.  With the world’s focus on the country of Ukraine in the news lately and because their national flower is the sunflower, I have been seeing lots of sunflower paintings on social media.  Thought I’d join the crowd and honor the brave Ukrainian people.  Sunflowers are an interesting plant.  They have the potential for growing so huge and tall that they can literally tower over a person standing next to them.  And I find the underside of a sunflower to be as interesting as the face, which always faces east toward the morning sun.  Sunflowers are so complex and have such personality; no wonder people love them.

My immediate dilemma I discovered before I started painting was that I don’t have very many yellow pastels.  I guess I haven’t done all that many paintings majoring in yellow before this. But I do have a few yellows in each of several reputable brands, so I thought I’d have no problem finding various shades and kinds of yellow.  Well, that turned out to be an insufficient qualifier for my preparedness in undertaking this project.  What I quickly found out is that not all yellow pastels cover my drawing marks.  Yikes!  I usually draw my initial contour lines with a charcoal pencil and as I paint, I cover them all up with color.  If I change my mind about where an edge should go, it’s really not a problem to move the edge or eliminate it altogether.  Not so easy with some yellow pastels.  The charcoal lines show through clear as ever, and in some cases, the yellow even smears the charcoal, making a blurry mess on the edges of some petals.  Oh my, not good, and super frustrating.

I finally had to resort to trying out every single yellow soft pastel I own, to see if each one would cover over a charcoal mark completely or simply blur it and leave a mess.  I was very surprised at the results.  Some brands which cover charcoal lines completely in all other colors besides yellow, were woefully inadequate to the task when it came to yellow.  I’m not going to name names of the brands that disappointed me, but I will state that one brand that I own and tried came through like a shining star – Unison.  Whew, at least one brand I already own could work for me.  BTW, no hard pastels cover up the charcoal markings completely, none.  So, I was left to trying out only my soft pastels. 

I practically did a happy dance in my studio when I found the two Unison yellows that did the trick.  Maybe that seems trite to you, but when you’ve spent many hours on a painting and you have a realistic style where finished edges can make or break a painting, having adequate tools to work with means everything.  Before I started this piece, I had no idea there was so much difference between pastel brands when it comes to yellow coverage.  Who would have guessed?  Not me.

At first, I thought maybe the paper I was working on wasn’t gritty enough.  But when I expressed my frustration on Facebook and my pastel artist friend Barbara Archer volunteered to join me in experimenting with various yellow brands, she used sanded pastel paper and her results were the same as mine.  OK, so it wasn’t my PastelMat surface that was the problem at all.  It was the yellow pastel sticks themselves.  BTW, Kathy Detrano also joined us in trying out yellow swatches on top of charcoal markings for a few days.  I really appreciated their help in this exploration of yellow pastels.

Why would there be such a difference between pastel brands of yellow?  It’s because of the chemical makeup of the sticks themselves.  They all have varying amounts of binder such as pumice, with varying amounts of yellow pigment too, and for some reason yellow is the one color where that difference between brands shows up in a big way.  BTW, even white pastel covers up charcoal markings better than yellow.  It’s like yellow by its nature is more sheer, more translucent than any other color in the rainbow.  And through doing some research online, I found out that our eyes only register a small group of colors that we recognize and label as yellow compared to any other color we can see.  Isn’t that interesting?

We discovered that there are a few other brands besides Unison that do a decent job of covering drawing marks.  They are: Roche, Sennelier, and Mt Vision.  A number of other soft pastel brands had mixed results, and we three women did not test all brands out there, so our results were not exhaustive or definitive.  But Unison, Roche, Sennelier, and Mt Vision definitely have yellow coverage covered.

Suffice it to say that I found out way more than how to render a sunflower when undertaking this painting project.  I also learned about the color yellow and how our eyes perceive yellow, the chemical makeup of pastels, and that Unison has a whole set of 18 yellow pastels that I will purchase soon.  YAY!  This was quite the adventure.  Glad I picked a sunny color to work with.  It turned out to be fun and very educational after all.  And through hard knocks I was able to finish off the edges of those sunflower petals too.  Whew!