First View Of Queendown Warren

Here’s my first ever painting using the soft pastels. Because I wasn’t expecting to be able to capture much detail, I picked a pretty plain view over the North Downs. It’s the first view you get after parking the car at the Eastern end of the Warren, hence the title.

I started by following some advice from the book and removed the paper wrapping from all the pastels and threw it away. A liberating experience. I didn’t break any of the pastels in half but found that about half of them had already broken. Not a problem. And, also following book advice, I set up a sloping desk easel so that dust could collect at the bottom of the painting and so I could stand back and look at my work.

I started by using the sides of pastels to block out the biggest areas, then laid more colour over the top, again with the edges. I used whatever colours felt appropriate and had no problems putting flesh colours in the sky, brown in all the grass and trees and blues and greys in the grass. I just had fun. I do think, though, that I’ll be putting some more soft pastels on my Christmas wishlist. I found myself missing yellows, reds, purples and oranges. Highly saturated versions of all those colours.

As I continued adding more pigment, I found myself smoothing out colours with my finger. Eventually I had to stop, though, wanting more detail and hard edges in the foreground. I tried creating hard edges with broken pastels but with little luck. Eventually I stepped back from the painting and realised that just being really loose with strokes in the foreground was enough to give the illusion of detail when standing back. I think I’ve achieved this with the trees. With the foreground, I kept working a bit longer until I was happy with the shadow colours.

And after a fourth and final run over the desk with a hoover, that was me done. Soft pastels might be messy but they can create really quick paintings. Worth remembering.

I’m really happy with this one as a first soft pastel painting. You need to stand back but, from a distance it does feel professional. Going forward, I will get some warm saturated colours at some point. But in the meantime I need to stop the finger smoothing at an earlier stage in the process (at least for landscapes). I also need to have a go at a portrait in soft pastel. And the sketchbook I used has rougher paper on the backs of the pages than on the front, so I may try out the back page next time and see if it can hold more pigment: the paper was starting to feel full towards the end today.

Anyway, this one’s definitely going up for sale and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were snapped up quickly.