Face to face - pastel walkthrough and tutorial

Based on pictures taken by my spouse at the Basel zoo (Switzerland)



This painting will represent the month of May 2014 in the calendar project in favor of the foundation "Artist for Conservation" cf see my main page at [link]

Soft pastel on pastel card 40cm x 30cm (rembrant soft pastels from the box "landscape")

If you like it, you can also have a look at some of my other painting such as



MY FIRST ARTBOOK AVAILABLE THROUGH AMAZON [link]

For any signed version of this book with an original sketch, please send me a note


Small tuto, this was my first attempt to apply an impressionism technique with soft pastels, to reach a more painterly look (nb I only used fixative to block the sketch, after i avoid to keep fresh colors), total ~15h

1. Sketching the animal
2. Bocked the dark with an almost black pastel, use a reworkable fixative on it
3. Start the 1rst blocked in color layer with low quality broken pastel
4. Add a second darken layers to fix a basis for the volume
5-6. With a dark pastel, I recreate the main line of the sketch in a spontaneous way
Rework the head with soft pastels chiselled
7. With a bright yellow pastel, I added highlights
8. I used a dark blue pastel to carefully increased shadows again
9. With a bright blue pastel chisel, I added a very small layers on the whole picture (increasing the pressure where highlights are located (en of the 1rst painting session, I waited 2 days before coming back to it to have fresh eyes on it)
10. I added a brown layers on most of the animal as I thought it was to blue/grey
11-12. I rework the highlights with differents ochre pastels, changes the tusks form to be more dynamics, then I started to work a bit on the rest of the body
13. Adding a background with a complementary color (bright colors against the elephant shadow)
14-17. I do the exactly the same for the body than for the face, apart that I used darker values
18. I refine the background and some details on the skin
19. Rework the skin to unify the colors with the background and contrast and minor changes
20. Last very very light brow layer on the full picture to unify the whole, I then took a picture and correct the picture colors on Painter 1 to be closer from the original pastel artwork