How to make dry pastels
This is a fun and easy method to make dry pastels using skim milk as binder, where gum arabic is more commonly used. This technique was taught to me by a excellent artist Olli Marttila back in 2006. It's been a while since and i haven't worked a lot with pastels in general, but this is a pretty fool proof method.
Dry pastels is a very peculiar medium. I like to use charcoal, which in some ways are similar, but I never really created anything that worked in dry pastel and I only know one colleague who actually succeeded in doing something usable with it. He made some small concrete abstract paper-works - and it took him many tries to reach a way. But for the same reason I always wanted to do some. Most of the works I have seen that utilize it properly are from the eighteenth century.
Like this one.
Yea it certainly has it's own kinks. I haven't done much either, but i remember my mom pulling some pretty nice figurative work long ago. I did do some larger experimenting today and while it was quite awkward at first, there is a nice quality to the color(with the few i made, cheap store bought stuff was too hard and meh) and the dusting thing kinda works for my purposes aswell.
The dry intense colour is really interesting. I wish I could think up a way to use them. The old masters of this technique used special fluffy paper, and sealed the finished pastel behind glass.
But Degas did a lot of it and he just used siccativ. He might be interesting to study a bit in connection with your experiments. I hope you post them here so we can see them.
For sure, I think i will put something up tomorrow if the pics didn't fail.We got a few pastel painters in the association here that prefer to frame behind glass. It's funny how Degas keeps popping up, i think we share a similar eye condition, inspiring stuff :D
Amazing tutorial. Thanks for share.
You're welcome