Soft Pastels: Two Women

In any case, I can say that I learned a lot from the two women. I did just about everything that is not allowed according to the rules. For example, I held the sketchpad on my lap with a few crayons on the edge, the phone with the image in one hand and the kneaded eraser in the palm of my other hand, with the relevant crayon between my fingers. That's far from ideal, but it's the way I do it, and it only works if you sit like that for 5 to 6 hours, otherwise your back starts to hurt a bit.

Of course, I made a lot of mistakes, such as the dimensions being incorrect (the proportions), because I had stuck my paper down, so the edges were already falling off and I had sometimes taken this into account and sometimes not. Although I thought the sketch was quite good, I am of course so stubborn that when using the soft pastels I decided to do something different (colouring outside the lines), with the result that I had to change the background 4 or even 5 times because the proportions were wrong.

I had a lot of trouble with the lack of colours. I had no idea how to mix the right colour, so I just did something and looked for something that was close to what I saw.
What I saw at first was of course not right either, because I had my phone on night mode, which made everything darker and the original image seemed to have little colour. After a few days, I realised this and when I switched to day mode and added some extra light, the images suddenly became a lot more colourful. Another problem was the woman's face. I think I made it white at least 10 times, which is something the paper can't handle. This type of paper is not suitable for many layers of soft pastel.

On the positive side, the underdrawing was a lot lighter than in all my other pastel drawings, which I found to be a big advantage. This certainly resulted in less dust, but the pencils also seemed to occasionally smudge next to or over the pastel. This finally allowed me to make good use of these pencils, which I honestly thought were a waste of money, for the first time. Incidentally, there is a clear difference between soft pastels and pencils. I couldn't rub the pencils either, so in the end I had to switch back to chalk for thin lines. Those fine lines work very well with chalk, because I've seen others do it. Even with much thicker soft pastels than the ones I have, but for me it was a bit of a gamble, hoping that the soft pastel would have a sharp edge so that I could draw a thin line with it.

I found this quite difficult, but it was fun to do and when I finished, I thought: never again. But now, a day later, I think I'm going to make another one and hopefully I'll do better or just make a simpler version.

_{10-1-2026
Materials:
Rembrandt soft pastels
Faber Castell Pitt pastel pencils + kneading eraser
Bamboo paper
Photos: all taken by me (Samsung + Motorola). Since the post been overwritten due to Steemit issues I had to take my photos from all directions.}