The Art of It

Having bought soft pastels to use with water colour (a demo by Cherry Nichol) I had the urge to play, using a technique I had seen done by Heather Selby . I used soft pastels on water colour paper, later discovering that you should actually use hard pastels first then the soft on top! I also had problems with the lighter colours becoming muddy but later discovered that you should use fixative on the dark colours before going into the light! But this is how we learn! Next time I will know what to do! I don't normally copy out of magazines but as this was just an experiment, I did. I then used some grey home made paper, soaked it and covered the pastel portrait with the saturated hand made paper, pressing lightly to transfer a ghost image onto the wet paper. Well it didn't work. The grey was not right. I didn't even bother to photograph it. After fixing the original pastel portrait I then used a sheet of white watercolour paper and soaked that. I covered the pastel ...