Bought pastels in a colour I can't use and now I'm scared to touch them
They arrived Tuesday, a Sennelier half stick set of greens. Thirty of them, all the way from the cold dark pine ones to a yellow green that is almost acid, and I keep opening the box and closing it again.
The thing nobody tells you about pastel is that half the job is destroying it. You can't paint carefully with it, you have to break the sticks and grind them into the paper with your thumb, and every time I start a green I have this moment where I think, this one will be the muddy one, and then I do it anyway and it is muddy.
I have a face I have been working on for three weeks. Toned grey paper, warm skin, and there is a shadow under the jaw that needs to be green or it goes dead. That is the whole reason I bought them. I know it, I have known it since the first week, and I still sat there tonight doing the ear again instead, which was already fine.
It's such a stupid thing to be afraid of. Thirty sticks of pigment, and they cost more than my first box of everything. I'll ruin some of them and that's what they're for.
Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm doing the jaw.
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Greens are the hardest color family there is. Mud isn't a mistake, it's what green does when you mix it wrong, and pastel gives you almost no room to fix it because you can't glaze over anything. You're fighting the medium, not the drawing.
If the face is toned grey, that's your problem right there. Grey under green pulls it toward dead every time. I'd put a warm ground under wherever the greens land, even just a raw sienna wash, and let some of it show through instead of covering it.
Also stop treating the sticks like they're precious. Break one. The first mark ruins the box anyway, so get it over with.
The warm ground thing is what got me, honestly. I had been told toned grey is the safe choice and I did not question it once in three weeks. Grey under green, of course it goes dead, I can see it now that someone says it out loud. Raw sienna wash under it, I will try that this week.
But I have to argue about the mud a little. Half the greens I make are wrong, yes, but some of them are the good kind of wrong, the olive that only shows up when you drag one green through another. Maybe that is just me being stubborn because it is the one thing I can do.
And I broke one. The darkest pine one, the one I was most afraid of. It felt terrible and then it felt fine.