3 Exercises for a Pastel Reboot
3 Exercises for a Pastel Reboot
Recharge your paintings using any of these three exercises to promote creative growth.
By Diane Rosen
It’s a common experience for artists: struggling to solve a creative problem, only to have the solution pop into your head during an unrelated task. This phenomenon occurs because it allows for incubation — temporarily removing a problem from conscious awareness, which activates the brain’s spontaneous processing mode and sparks creative growth and inspiration.
There are many ways to promote this kind of flexible thinking. Here are three exercises that have consistently worked for me to keep the painting process more creatively open.
1. Let Your Mind Wander
Leonardo da Vinci once said: “Looking attentively at old walls, stones, and veined marble of various colors, you may fancy you see in them landscapes, battles, figures in motion, strange countenances, and an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the mind of the painter is excited to new exertions, stimulated to new inventions.”
More than 500 years after this observation, cognitive neuroscience indicates he was on the right track. Studies suggest that our brain’s “mind wandering” is primarily responsible for generating new ideas and creative growth; the logical mind is more involved in refining them. Bringing “confusion” into your pastel work prompts inspiration and adds fun and excitement to the process.
Familiarity and Chance
For this exercise, I begin by preparing my paper (usually a sturdy, textured Fabriano Murillo) using thinned acrylic paint that I randomly spatter, pour, or drip onto the surface. The resulting pattern is an evocative visual field, with a charged atmosphere and expressive qualities of its own. Once the acrylic paint dries, I sketch figures into and over it with charcoal, wiping out and redrawing until a pleasing composition begins to emerge. I then develop my forms in pastel, as I did in Whirligig. Open strokes in some areas leave spattered paint partially visible, giving those areas a semi-transparent appearance; more heavily applied pastel obscures the painted markings in other sections, rendering the figures more realistic.
As familiar elements interact with ones that appear by chance, their relationships make this approach continually exciting. Accidental trails and daubs of paint stir the imagination, enhancing images in ways I never could have predicted or planned.
2. Power Up With Play
Whatever your pastel style, from realistic to abstract, play can revitalize your process. In this context, play implies taking creative risks without worrying about making mistakes, keeping an open mind, and looking at things from different perspectives. This playful attitude eases the usual constraints and allows you to work in a more spontaneous way.
Using Photographs
My figurative pastel paintings sometimes originate from life, but more often they’re based on my photographs of models. For me, one very effective means of composing begins with selecting 8 to 12 images of different poses and photocopying them in black and white. I then cut the entire figure out of each copy (saving the original photos for future reference). This allows me to play around with endless compositions. These forms can be freely arranged and re-arranged without regard to real time or space (i.e., the actual models were never in my studio at the same time), and with no prior plan limiting the possibilities.
If the direction of an image disrupts the flow of a particular grouping, I reverse its orientation using Photoshop. This is what I did for Rotation. I settled on a composition in which I rotated one of the models by 180 degrees.
Once I discover a satisfying composition, I paste the cutouts onto a 4×6-inch piece of paper. This small composite image serves as a reference for starting a new pastel on the prepared surface (as described in Exercise 1).
3. Use the Tension of Opposites
Although unfocused attention enhances creative growth and thought, the opposite ability to direct attention consciously to aspects of the process also is crucial. The following approach is more deliberate than spontaneous, but it still brings a jolt of real excitement to your pastels.
Opposites are among the most basic creative tools for any style or genre: dark and light, warm and cool, line and form, large and small, near and far, to name a few. Balancing such pairs in distributed symmetry sometimes works, but overdoing it can actually diminish the impact of your composition. Rather than strive for perfect balance, try increasing the tension — or contrast — between opposites. It seems counterintuitive, but it really works to liven up a composition.
All About Contrast
Huddled Bathers is an example of leveraging opposites. In this composition, the main subjects are decentralized and pushed to the extreme left; however, they’re balanced asymmetrically by a large section of negative space on the right, toward which both heads are turned. Along with spatial balance and imbalance, the contrasts strongly emphasized include: foreground (figures) and depth (implied atmospheric distance); hard and soft (or lost) edges; realism and abstraction; warm and cool tones; and open and closed pastel strokes. When contrasting qualities are intensified, each one strengthens the other.
Each of these three exercises offers a powerful means for creative growth and gaining fresh perspective, breaking habitual or obvious thought patterns, and making unexpected connections. Use them individually or together in the same pastel painting. The goal is to enjoy the unpredictability and follow any new avenues that might open. A willing- ness to experiment freely makes getting started less intimidating and the entire process more fun.
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