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Painting What You See in a Pastel Landscape
The power of suggestion is a strong tool in the hands of an artist. For example, when a landscape painting is viewed, visual bits and pieces are processed and assembled into a recognizable image by the viewer.
But not all that visual information has to literally be there. Truly! Often with only an indication, a viewer will be able to finish what the artist suggested and ultimately believe that there was more detailed information portrayed than was actually there.
Richard McKinley is a great believer in “less is more.” Below, he breaks down the strategies we need so every pastel landscape we create says a lot without getting ruined with detail.
If that sounds as good to you as it does to me, Alla Prima Pastel Painting with Richard McKinley is your next step. The video puts all Richard’s popular teachings for graceful, lovely pastels all in one place for you! Enjoy!
What Is That?
From childhood, humans internalize knowledge about what they see. This becomes stored in the “what we know” area of the brain and allows us to quickly identify things.
Conversely, when a young child sees something for the first time, they ask, “What is that?” Left unchecked, this internalized knowledge of what things are can get in the way of painting what we truly see.
The Use of Line
Painters rely upon shapes of color, tone and value to represent what it is they are portraying. These form the visual bits and pieces that make up a painting. But there is another mark that the artist is capable of making that, in reality, doesn’t exist in nature – line.
From the time that humans were capable of picking up a stick and making a mark in the soil, they have relied upon line to represent things. These marks evolved into text that could be read and contour shapes that symbolized specific things. But, in reality, it is really the contrast of color and value that makes something stand out and become recognizable in a scene — not line.
Painting the Essence
While line may have its purposes and, in the hand of a competent artist, is capable of representing a style of painting, it can also become detrimental to the representational artist when used to portray such things as blades of grass, tree branches, hair and various other things that are often associated to line. I witnessed this at an early age while learning to paint portraits.
After spending meticulous hours placing every strand of hair on a head, the instructor pointed out to me that I couldn’t really see all of those hairs, especially from root to tip. Instead, I was putting in what I knew about hair, instead of what I was capable of seeing.
Essence vs Line
By showing me the texture of hair was more evident where there was contrast, facilitated by the presence of intense light, I was able to let go of what I knew to be true about hair and paint what I was capable of seeing, which was the “essence” of hair. I could relate this lesson, then, to the grasses in a field and the limbs and branches of trees.
A pastel stick makes it easy to draw lines. To avoid what is contemptuously referred to as “The Spaghetti Phenomenon,” it is imperative to vary the pressure of application. This is true especially when the pastel marks are intended to represent things that have depth and form yet are associated to line.
Artful Example
My en plein air pastel painting “Glenna’s Spot” offers an example. Instead of overly defining the individual tree limbs, I chose to use hit-and-miss pastel marks that indicated a directional thrust yet were not a constant line.
The suggestion of the limbs is minimal. Hopefully, it is just enough to let the viewer’s imagination to be engaged, allowing them to be part of the painting.
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