Basics of Pastels: All You Need to Know About Pastel Tools, Blending, Layering + Two Easy Landscapes

1. Welcome!: I love making art with pastels, because they produce brilliant colors and you can just dive straight in without needing paint brushes, solvents, or a palette. All you really need to get started are some pastel 6 and a sheet of paper. Hello. My name is Victoria Mikoart, and I'm a portrait artist specializing in pastel medium. I have created a whole lot of animal art, drawings of people, homes, and landscapes. Pastels are so versatile, you can use them to create many subjects and genres. Since I've started working with them, they have quickly become my favorite medium to draw with. I enjoy pastel so much that I want to share with you everything I know about them. In the first lesson, we will learn what soft pastels are made of and to take a look at the different qualities and how to use pastel safely. In the second lesson, we will take a look at the different types of pastels you can buy, which are soft pastels, hard pastels, pastel pencils, and we will also briefly look at oil pastels to see how they differ from soft pastels. In the third lesson, we will consider what surfaces you might choose for your pastel art. In the fourth lesson, I will spill all of my secrets about the best blending tools I use, which really go a long way in elevating your drawing. In the fifth lesson, we will take a look at the blending techniques, specifically how to lighten and darken sections of your drawing, and learn the basics of building depth or dimension in your art. Finally, we will put all of our newly acquired skills to practice and create two really beautiful drawings. You may follow along with just one of them or both. Trust me, they are a lot simpler to create than they look. We will use very simple techniques and I will slowly guide you through the whole process. Hopefully by the end of this class, you will have a good understanding of pastels and be able to show a 3D impressive artwork. I am truly delighted to present this class to you, so let's begin. See you in the first lesson. 2. What Are Soft Pastels?: Hi and welcome to the lesson. We're going to start by talking about what soft pastels are. They are essentially pigments that have been mixed with water to make a paste. Then a binder is added to them so that they stay intact and hold onto the paper. They are formed into a certain shape like a cylinder and then they are dried. Then once they are dried, you can use them directly on the paper to apply pigment and to draw them. You can get them in varying degrees of hardness. I will tell you a bit more about this in the next lesson. By an essence, you can get a hard pastel stick. They are usually quite long and thin. Then you have soft pastel sticks, which are usually shorter and wider, or they can also be cylinders and you can also have the pastels in pencil form, which I have all over there on my wall. Here I have one here. It's essentially pastel in a pencil. This versality means that you can use your pastels for all subjects and genres. You can use the pencils to draw very detailed pieces, and then the pastel sticks to create very beautiful painterly effects. Now let's talk about the quality. You can get a whole range of these, usually pastels that have more pigment and less binder are more expensive, so they are known as artist quality pastels. They produce more intense colors, but they are also more prone to breaking since they have less of the filler holding them together. They also have high permanence ratings, which means that they won't fade over time. Then you have student quality pastels which are much cheaper, but they usually contain cheaper pigments and they'll also contain more filler and binder. This means that the colors won't be as intense, but they also won't crumble as easily as artist quality pastels. Honestly don't feel pressured if you don't have artist quality pastels, to be completely honest. I completed a whole bunch of drawings using only the student pastels and they've worked wonderfully for me. I would recommend these two. In fact, I don't know if I actually have any artist quality pastels. I think all the ones I've been using, they are just student quality because I go for them so quickly. I just get them on Amazon for $15, $20. They work perfectly for me. One thing to consider is the safety when you're working with pastels. They essentially deposit fine dust into the air and you can easily inhale this. There are now non-toxic pastels available but still you probably don't want to inhale pastel dust anyway. Some artists they wear face masks. But honestly if you were drawing something for a very long time, like when I draw my animal portrait shot, it takes me hours and hours, days even. It can get quite uncomfortable and inconvenient. If you maybe have nice weather then it would be better to work outside. If you are indoors, then make sure your room is well ventilated. If there's no window, put on the fan. But what I do is I just avoid blowing the pastel dust. It's very tempting, but don't do it. You get pastel dust that gathers all the time when you're working with them, especially soft pastels. But a little trick that I found for myself is I have a little desk vacuum, so whenever I have too much pastel build up, I use this and I scoop it up. 3. The Different Pastel Types: Now we will talk about the types of pastels. There are four main types, we have the soft pastels, hard pastels, pencils, and oil pastels. They are all essentially pigment in a stick form, but what makes them different is how they are bound together. Let's begin by talking about soft pastels. As we know, soft pastels are pigment held together by a binder, and we also know that the more expensive artist quality pastels have a higher ratio of pigment to binder, and the more affordable student quality pastels have less pigment and more binder. Soft pastels have a very fragile consistency and a powdery texture, which makes them great for blending. If you pick them up of your head, they immediately leave a lot of pigment residue on your fingers and a lot of people consider it messy to use. You can create all sorts of strokes, for soft pastels you can get very wide strokes if you use the side of the stick or you can even use the very edge for fine lines. But honestly it's quite hard to get the precision with a soft pastel stick because of their shape. What a lot of artists do, and this includes myself, is I use the soft pastels for doing things like base layers, or backgrounds, things that don't really require that much precision, and then I use pastel pencils on top of them but you can also use hard pastels on top of it to also get that precision. Soft pastels come in cylindrical sticks and they have a range of sizes. You have whole sticks, half sticks, fixed sticks, and you can also buy them individually. But I would recommend that if you are buying your first pastels, it would be easier to buy a starter set with a balanced color palette so you can build on it over time and buy individuals sticks if you wish to. There are also pan pastels, which I put in the same category as soft pastels. I don't have any to show you, but they are, instead of being shaped into sticks, they come in tiny little jars and essentially this means that you have a lot less binder in them because you don't have to shape them into a stick so they have higher hire ratio of pigment. The way you apply them is you have a type of sponge because you can't just apply the pastel directly on the paper like with stick pastel you need a tool. There are pros and cons of this. The advantage is that they are amazing to paint backgrounds, but they're not as opaque as some of the other options, so it's a little harder to cover up mistakes. Pros are that they are a little cleaner to use because you don't have to touch the pastel with your fingers, and they are also much superior at bending than using your fingers. Next we have hard pastels. They are essentially made from the same ingredients as with soft pastels, except for, and this is important, the ratio. They have a lot more binder and a lot less pigment, so they have lower color intensity as you can see. This is soft pastel and this is the hard pastel, so when I apply it, even though I'm pressing quite hard, it comes out quite light. They usually come in long square sticks, which are so much better suited for creating the fine lines compared to the soft pastels and you could also use the broad side of the pastel for applying broad strokes of color. Again, as I said earlier, the most common way to use hard pastels is to use them in combination with soft pastels and you can use soft pastels for creating backgrounds and generally fitting in larger areas, and then use hard pastel sticks to add the finer details. As far as blending goes, because they have so much more binder, they are a little bit hard to blend, as you can see, it's not really moving around much. Next we have our pastel pencils, so they are just like your regular pencils but encased within the wood is a thin stick of pastel that has a consistency that's in-between hard and soft pastels. Pastel pencils are perfect if you're looking to create more controlled detailed works with pastel. Because they have that precision, so you can really create all controlled shapes. Pastel pencils are versatile enough to be used on their own, but many artists use them in combination with other pastel types, especially soft pastels. Like I said, I use soft pastels to build the base layer, and then I put the soft pastel pencils on top to add the details. You can sharpen them to a fine point to create very precise details or you can use them, bluntly for soft, hazy lines, many artists, and again, this includes myself use them for the fundamental sketches and that's very handy given that graphite pencils don't work with pastels. I find them super convenient because they're not messy like soft pastels, you can easily create quick spontaneous drawings with little preparation or clean up, and still enjoy the pleasing qualities of pastels. If you are looking for a place to start, I enjoy using the stabilo carbothello pastel pencils, and they are artists grade and they are also quite well-priced and you can buy them in sets or you can buy them individually. An important note about soft pastels, hard pastels and pastel pencils is that they are all bound with the same kind of binder, which means that they are compatible with one another, and you can use all of them on the same drawing. As you can see, in terms of blending, you can definitely blend them quite easily and you can lay on top of them. Next we have oil pastels, and I'm only mentioning them because a lot of people don't really know the difference. But after this point, we won't talk about oil pastels anymore because I don't really consider them in the same category as the soft pastels, but they are essentially bound with oil and wax so this gives them that unique texture that is very similar to oil paints but this means that it cannot be mixed with other pastel types. They have a quite different textures of pastels, they are a lot more creamy and they feel damp or somewhat sticky. Oil pastels are like wax crayons, so it's much more difficult to blend them but they don't make your fingers dirty. This is a clean finger. It's quite difficult to move this color around but as you can see, it's not really left that much color on my finger. An advantage also is that they don't produce a lot of dust. If anything, they leave like clumps of pigment but it's not dusty like soft pastels. Another note is that soft pastels can be used like an opaque watercolor, so if you draw on the paper with them and then use a wet brush, then it creates a very similar effect to watercolor. But if you put water on the oil pastels, the wax resist it so you can't really use the oil pastels as watercolors. But yes, this is all we have to say about the oil pastels and from now on, we will just be referring to soft pastels. 4. Best Surfaces for Pastels: There are so many different pastel papers but the main thing you have to consider is the tip of the paper. Because pastels are dry, they need something to hold onto, they won't just attach to any surface, they need the surface to have tubes, so it can grip onto to it. My favorite paper to use is the Clairefontaine Pastelmat, and this is a bit more high-end. I will show you a cheaper alternative, but if you can get your hands on this, I would highly recommend it. The texture of this is almost like sandpaper. It has rough grains that are very close together, so you can imagine the way the pastel holds onto it is by filling up the areas in between the grains. You can get the surface and both the sheet and the board form. The sheet is just like your regular paper, it's thin and bendy, but the card has a three millimeter thickness. It is a bit of a study surface which is good if you're going to draw a very large piece. But otherwise, that card is great. They come in a variety of shades and sizes, the size is your preference, it depends on what you are working on. But in terms of the shade, I would like to recommend that the dark gray color instead of using white. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that you can work with both dark and light colors from the start. If you want to add white in a certain area, you can do that on a toned paper. Another reason is that it's a lot easier to judge how dark or a light color is on a toned paper. If you apply a gray pastel on the white paper, then the grain might look darker than it really is because of all the white contrast around it. Then when you continue adding more colors to the portrait, and around the gray patch, the gray might lose its perceived darkness. By using a mid toned paper, you will be able to see the color value more correctly without the illusion of a white background. The second type of pastel paper I would recommend is the Ingres Daler and Rowney paper. This is significantly cheaper and I have seen a lot of artists use this and it works fine, especially if you are a beginner. If you're just starting out and are looking to practice, this is what I would recommend. This paper also comes in a bunch of different shades, so it's fantastic for practice, and you can also see what shade of paper works best for you. Once you have some experience with pastels, I would recommend with the Clairefontaine Pastelmat, I along with what seems like the whole world of pastel artists swear by this so it's for good reason. 5. Possible Blending Tools: Now we will talk about the blending tools. As we already know, pastels are very dusty and they need a little bit of help to be worked into paper. You can still see the texture of the paper underneath and also if we blow on this, a lot of the pasta would fly off as it's not secured within the texture of the paper. We need to find a way to work the pastel into the texture of the paper. There are endless tools you can use to blend your pastels. One way that's very good and you have at the disposal of your fingers. Make sure that you have a wet wipe with you at all times to avoid spreading around the pastel. You should also use it in between blending to clean your fingers. You don't want to blend a green region and then move on to read and end up mixing these colors together. When you blend it with your fingers, it doesn't move the product around too much, and it mostly just works into the paper. Another tool which you probably already have in your home is a Q-tip or a cotton bud. Your fingers are great at pushing the pastel into the paper, but a Q-tip has more of a rough surface so it's able to pick up a lot of the pastel and move it around, which makes it a great blending tool. One of my personal favorite ways to blend is by using blending stumps. These are very cheap and you can find them in any old store. It's essentially compressed papers, so you can file these down to remove the color. Honestly, I don't see many people use them for pastel drawings, I believe they are made for blending charcoal and graphite pencils, but they are wonderful for blending pastels. They carry a lot of products, so they are great at creating a smooth blend, and they also have very good precision since they are also pointy. These usually come in a few different sizes, so you can use these for both large and very small areas. Now my absolute favorite blending tool is the soft pastel knife. I have mentioned it earlier because it's great for applying pan pastels. But even if you don't use pan pastels, it is still worth having these tools. I only have one sponge shape and allows me to do everything, so don't worry about buying good different ones, this is more than enough. You can easily take off the sponge cover if you are switching between colors. It just blends the pastels so beautifully. You can easily blend a massive area with just one tool. You don't really need to go back and forth with this much, it creates a beautiful blend with just one stroke. 6. Blending Techniques - How to Lighten & Darken Colours: Pastel colors are blended together very easily, but one disadvantage is that your colors are tricky to mix. If you are painting, then you can mix the colors on the palette, but if you were just working with pastel sticks then it's hard to mix them before applying them onto the paper. This means that when you do mix your pastels, you have to do it directly on your surface. If you have a full set of pastels, you might not have to do this so much because pastel manufacturers know of this issue, so they offer a huge range of colors to compensate for this difficulty with color mixing. But still, you will add a lot of highlights and shadows to your drawings. Let's go through some blending techniques. Let's do this demonstration test. I will just do a quick circle. This is not an ideal circle, but it's a rough circle shape. If this circle is pink, we have a circle and now let's imagine that the light is coming from over here. Now let's think about the different ways that we could change the color of the circle to lighter or darker. There are a few ways that we can increase the darkness of a color. If we draw a shadow here, the first way that we can do it is by using a complimentary color, so a complimentary color for this would be a greenish color. If we add the shadow, this is the shadow, because the light is coming from this way, then the shadow would fall over here. Now if we blend this, you can see that it's turning the pink into a darker shade. This is just a rough demonstration, but I hope it shows you that you can do this with complimentary colors. Let's blend this quickly. If we have another circle, we can also use a black pastel. Let's spend this together now. If we have one more circle. Now, the third way that you can increase the darkness of this color is by using a darker version of the color. Yes, these are the freeways. I'll also show it to you with the green color because it's not so clear. We have a green circle here, and then we have a darker green. You see it's creating this nice depth. These are just a few ways that you can make the color darker. It really depends on the effect that you're trying to achieve, but I would try to not use black so much because I feel it often desaturates the color. If we draw another green circle and then we use a black pastel, then you'll be able to see how it doesn't look quite as nice as this one above. Let me make this one a bit darker to show you so it really is clear. You can see how the one here on the top, it has a more rich and vibrant change in color, whereas the black desaturates the color below it. Now we know how to make our colors darker. Now let's talk about how we can make our color lighter. You can use, first of all, a lighter version of the color. For example, we have a lighter pink here and we're bearing in mind that the light is coming from this direction, so the highlight would be focusing over here. If we blend, then you see it still has this rich and vibrant changing color. We can also lighten the color by adding white. Let's try this here. I'll also show you that much lighter pink because I feel like that was quite hard to see. The two main ways is that you can use either a lighter version of the color or you can use white. But again, you might be able to see that the white desaturates the pink color, whereas this is still quite a rich pink value. I would recommend that you use either one based on what you were trying to achieve, but I find that beginners, they often pick up the white and black more as opposed to darker versions of the colors or complimentary colors. But I feel like once you stop picking up the complimentary colors and darker versions of the color, once you stop thinking about this a bit more, then this is how you elevate your drawing skills. But then another way that we can lighten this, for example, if we are using green, we can also use yellow because yellow is in the green families. If we use yellow on this and we blend it, you can see it blends quite seamlessly and it creates a nice highlight. This is how you can blend and create a transition of color. Try this with other colors to get a feel of pastels and get comfortable with blending. Now that you know what pastels are made of, what tools you will need, the basics of blending, I would recommend that you grab some scrap paper and pastels and play around with them to get a feel of how pastels work. See what happens when you press harder, when you try to lay and blend. See what strikes you can achieve with them. Can you use the flat side of a pastel to achieve a cloud texture or maybe the edge of a green pastel to imitate grass? Try these without any goal in mind and you'll actually learn lots about pastels. This is it for me. In the next lesson, we're going to move on to the demonstrations. We're going to put all of our skills to practice and we're going to create some really beautiful art. I will see you then. 7. Let's Paint a Simple Sunset: Hi, artist, and welcome to the demonstration. In this lesson, we are going to be drawing a sky. We will try to imitate a purplish pinkish sunset. We'll practice some blending, we will practice building a gradient and drawing some cloud textures. I'm using this sketch book, but I cut my paper into half so that I can have a smaller size because we don't care to have a very big grand detailed drawing. I'm just making it small so that we can get some practice done, and yes, get the hang of pastels. Then the next thing you will need are your pastels, you don't need anything high-quality. Honestly, all of the work that I did starting out was done with cheap pastels that were £10, or $, or less, and that's pretty much it. Those are the only tools you will need. I would also recommend having a wet wipe so that you can clean your fingers in-between the blending so that we don't contaminate our colors. Another bonus is I would recommend that you have a blending tool, but if you don't have it, then that's okay. We'll practice blending with both our finger under this tool, so you can do both. Another bonus tool is a pastel pencil, and this I would only use it for sketching out the initial drawing. But if you don't have this, you can just use the edge of your soft pastel. Again, I'll show you both options. I'm going to put a photo of the finished piece so that you can have it as a reference photo as we're creating. Essentially, I would start by drawing the clouds, and this is really the only thing we'll have to sketch because the sky is just a gradient, there's nothing really to sketch there. I'm just sketching this cloud, and I'm just creating a blob. It doesn't have to be any specific shape, just something really quick and simple. I'll do another one here, picking out from the side. If you don't have a pencil, feel free to use the edge of the soft pastel. If I create this small cloud over here. Both work as long as you're just not using it very lightly. The first stage is done. We've done the sketch, and now we don't need our pastel pencil anymore. You can see that the pigment has transmitted onto my fingers. I'm going to wipe it on my tissue, on my wet wipe. Now we're going to start by drawing the background. We will create a gradient. We'll try to go from purple to pink as we go down. I'm using a pink pencil to sketch the outlines because the background is going to be purplish pinkish, so the outline lines are going to integrate with the background. For example, if we had to use a green, then it would be very hard to cover up the outlines if we had a purple background. Yes, so use a purplish or pinkish color. I'm going to go from the top down. I looked for a purple color. This one, it's almost like a little bit gray tinted. You don't have to have the exact same color. You can have one that's slightly more pink, slightly more blue, whatever suits you as long as the color at the top is different from the color at the bottom. Anyway, I'm going to sketch over the entire background. We can use the side of our pastel for quick application. As I'm doing this, I'm not going into the clouds because remember that pastel paper, we don't want to fill up all the layers because if we draw a very thick layer of the background, then it's going to be very hard to draw light clouds over it. I'm going to leave them out for now, and I'll just go around them to create the background. When we draw a gradient, something that's important is we don't want to go from a solid purple color and then stop drawing about this point and then go into drawing with pink. We don't want them to be separate. We want them to overlap. I'm doing purple. Then even though this area is going to be a bit more pink, I'm still going to go over it slightly with the purple, so here. I'm going to put this to the side, and now I'm going to choose a pink color for the bottom. I've got this pinkish color. I'm filling in the whole thing. Then I'm not going to stop here. I'm not going to stop right underneath the purple, I'm going to overlap so that in the middle there is a more seamless blend. We're going to go from purple to pink at the bottom, and then in the middle we're going to have a mix of them both. Because in nature, especially on the sky, the colors they all blend so that you don't really have any hash marks. This is important to make the drawing look convincing. I'm doing quite a thick layer of this. I'm trying to cover up all of the white areas. I'll also add a bit more purple here because I can still see quite a lot of the white showing for. If you can just see a little bit of the white showing for, don't worry because we're going to blend it together I feel like I just have too much white showing. Now we are going to try to blend everything together. If we use our finger, start at the bottom. We can create somewhat of a blend. But this is why I say with your finger it's not ready that great to blend because it doesn't really build such a smooth coverage. For example, now if I wipe my finger and I use my tool, then you'll see that the colors they just blend so much smoother. It's also faster as well because if you were to do this with your finger, then it would take you a while to get such a smooth blend. But with the soft pastel blender, it takes a minute and you're done. If you want, you can even create this layer again. If you feel like the white of the paper is still showing through then you can just create one more layer, so plus pink. Go all the way to the top. Now if we blend again, then the color is much more solid. We don't have any of the white showing for. It's the thing with pastels, you have to work with layers. When I'm blending the sky, I'm trying to blend in a straight line. Usually if I'm trying to get a very smooth blend then I'll go into this motion, but with the sky, it looks like streaks. I am trying to have this effect going on. Next, we are going to now do the clouds. The clouds at sunset, they're never quite white. They usually have like a more warm color to them. Usually, they have a color of yellow, some pink showing further. I'm going to use the same pink that I had used for this section and I'm going to use some very light yellow color. Yes, so fast. I'm going to create at the bottom the shape of a cloud. I'm not covering the entire cloud, just a section of it. Now I'm going to blend it. Excel with my finger. But there's sometimes blending with your finger I'm blending with the sponge. It creates a different effect because the sponge carries so much pigment that it will literally carry the pigment elsewhere. If you were to use this over the cloud, then you can smudge it so that it would integrate with the background. But we don't want that. We want it to stay in place. When we use our finger, it just doesn't pick up so much pigment. I feel like it just works a little nicer for a cloud. Then anyway, with the yellow, now, I'm doing the top of the cloud and with a clean finger and blending. You can repeat the process. You might even want to use the pencil to have some harsh lines. You can use the edge of your pastels stick as well. I'm happy with this cloud and now we're going to repeat the same process for this cloud here. Remember the bottom fast with the pink, we blend, and then the other. You can use your pencil to add some darkness. Now, because we are going down towards the pink, the pink color doesn't stand out so much from the purple sky. Instead I'm going to take the purple color and I'm going to just draw a line right at the bottom just so we can isolate the cloud from the background some more. Now, I'm going to blend in with the rest. We can again use our pencil. I just want to bring out the shape of the cloud some more at the top. We don't have long legs now, the last cloud and this one, I'm only going to use purple because it would just blend entirely with this background so first, I'm using purple and blending. I didn't make it quite a dark cloud. I'm now adding some white. I'm just using a bit more of the red pencil color. Again, if you don't have this pencil, just use a pastel in a different color too. It just works the same. It's just about having a more precise tip like this has. I would just like to add some more clouds faded in the background. I'm going to take a new color, and this one is roughly the same color of the pencil that I was using. Here it is compared to the other two. It's an in-between between these colors. It's not as blue as this one, but you know, it's different than these two. I'm going to draw some streaks and blend them in so that they look like clouds in the distance. I'm going to add some white to it. Now, another thing that would add a nice touch is if we draw some stars. I'm picking up a white, soft pastel and I am just going to draw dots. I'm not sure you're just pressing it on the paper. If you have a white pastel pencil then what you can even do is draw lines coming out with some of them so that they look even more like stars. You don't have to do this to all of them just some. This is done now. Why don't we take off our tape and see how that looks underneath? I always love this part the most. It's very satisfying. This is our drawing. I think this is a really nice study of a sunset. I would love if you replicate this drawing with me and follow along. In the next lesson we are going to draw more of a winter landscape. I will see you there. 8. Snowy Winter Landscape: Welcome to the lesson. In this lesson, we are going to be drawing a winter tree. We'll have a tree in the middle. We'll have some bluish background and some snow. We'll have a lot of snow sitting on the tree branches. Again, the tools are the same. You just need some paper. I recommend having a wet wipe so that you can clean your fingers in-between using the pastels. You will also need your pastels. Of course, your soft pastels. As an optional tool, I do recommend having the soft pastel sponge because it does create such a smoother blend. As an additional tool, I would also suggest having a pencil just so we can write the initial sketch, but you don't need this. You can also create sketch with the edge of your soft pastel. I just like to use this because it gives me more precision. Anyway, with this, I'm going to sketch out a triangular shape roughly where the tree would be. We're doing this because we don't want to draw the background over the entire tree region. Because as we have learned previously, the pastel paper has two. Essentially, if you fill up all of the areas, then you won't have enough space to build layers. We don't want to draw the background over the whole thing because then when we want to add the green and white over it, then it would be very difficult to add to these layers. We're just going to draw the background in the area where we actually need it. Then we will draw the tree separately. We have the tree about here. We don't need to be specific about the shapes or the details. Just literally highlight where you want it to be. As you can see, this is looking advanced. I'm just drawing a very basic triangle. Then here, we'll separate the snow from the sky. It's roughly straight. It needs to be in line. Now, we don't need this anymore. Now, we're going to do the background. I'm going to use a light blue color. I'm using the flat end of it just because it gives much faster coverage. I'm doing quite a generous layer of this blue all over the top part. As you can see, you have the reference of the finished image on the screen so you can use this as a comparison and a guide. Now, why don't we use a slightly more darker color? We'll just add some darkness right to the bottom of the horizon just so that the sky can get dark as it goes up by initially just doing the slightest hint of it. I want there to just be a very small gradient. Now, even with your finger or your blending tool. You're just going to start to work this into the paper. Also, if you want, you can try doing this with a tissue or a sponge. If you got a bit of a sponge or a Q-tip, try it all out. Do everything. See what works best for you. I like this nice because I feel like it's the cleanest way to blend and the fastest. It also gives you a very smooth finish. This is the background we've done. Now, we will do the snow. I'm going to use the same blue color that I used for the sky. I'm just going to draw some lines in the snow so that it looks like there's hills of snow. Also, we're going to have some shadow right underneath the tree. Some blue snow shadow. With a darker one too. Now, I am going to add some white. This is the thing. If we had worked on turned paper, then we would have been able to add this white immediately because you could see lighter shades on a darker colored paper. But since we're working on a white paper, if we apply this one here, you can't really see anything. So this is why I was [inaudible] for our area. But as you can see, there are ways. You can always add the white bits last, or you can even use the white of the paper as your highlights. I'm just adding this in areas where I want it to be very snowy. If you look at snow, then the shadows are usually quite blue. Yes, I was using the blue color to create shadows. I'm just blending with my finger. You can use either your finger or the sponge. Anything you have. It's just that when you use your finger, it has a very different finish. The finger doesn't carry as much pigment. So if I had used this on a pastel sponge, then it really picks up a lot of color. Then you need to be able to carry around everywhere. But when you use your finger to blend, you leave it in place. You can use that to your advantage. In the moment, when you do a tree, I'm definitely going to use my finger a lot more because I don't want the tree to blend with the background. I want my soft pastel marks to stay in place. I'm just going to reinforce the shadow. Now, we are going to do the tree. We are going to pick up our green pastel pencil. I'm actually not going to press too hard because we don't want to fill up the whole layer with green, and then not be able to create the snowflakes on top. I'm literally just creating a very thin layer of this green color. I'm going downwards in a curved way. I'm essentially just drawing squiggles really. Nothing too complicated. It's just the branches get longer as they go down. It's all going to be covered by the snow anyway. I'm just creating the messy texture of branches. We're going to just lightly blend this into the paper just with my finger, just so we push the pigment into the paper. Now we are going to take our blue color and we're going to draw the snowflakes on top. Don't worry if your tree looks very bad right now because we will reinforce it and make the branches look at much better. It's just as I said, we don't want to take up the whole space. I'm creating shapes on this tree to resemble big layers of snow. Again, I'm using the blue color. In a moment we'll add some white on top of it. Let me just do one more here. Now I'm going to use the white color and I will just go over that blue areas on the top. I'm using a black color and I'm just going to reinforce the branches in-between the snow because the tree is definitely quite dark. I'm creating the branches in the areas that the snow isn't layered over them. Now I'm just going to use my green and I'll go over the black area. I'm doing this just because I want the green to be quite dark. I don't want it to be a bright shade of green, I want it to be in-between black and green. That's why I'm layering these two colors together to hopefully give it some depth and shade. We're almost done. I'm just going to add more of this blue color. This is pretty much done as well. I would just like to reinforce the shadow underneath a little bit. Then with my finger, also I'm just going to use my blending stump to get rid of the texture of the pastel strokes. I want to blend the bright green with the black a little bit more as well. I'm just going over a little tiny bit. There we have it. Our two studies are complete. Now let's pull this off. I always really like adding the tape because it gives it this clean look on the edges. Of course, this is not an essential step, it's just done. I like doing it. You have to have this to have this clean look and also is because that whenever you're working on an easel, you obviously need to secure your pastel surface to something. That's why I use the tape. Our drawing is complete. Here it is, alongside our previous study. What do you think of them? Tell me which one you liked more. I would love to see a project in the projects and resources tab below. I look forward to giving you feedback. I hope you enjoyed this. In the final lesson, we will go over our final thoughts and more details about the project. So I will see you then. 9. Final Thoughts & Thank You: Hello, artists. We made it to the final lesson. Thank you so much for taking my class. If you enjoyed it, I would absolutely love if you left a positive review, or a comment, or a project. Your interactions with the class help it show up on Skillshare, so other students may find it. If you have any questions or would like me to clarify anything in the class, please ask below and I will be very happy to help you. Make sure that when you upload your project, leave a link to your social media or your website, so others can find more work from you. For the class project, I would love for you to follow some of the simple illustrations and upload them. I would love to see your drawings and, of course, I will provide feedback too. I have more pastel classes here in Skillshare. For example, in this class, we drew a summary lemon branch using very simple techniques. We learned about base layers, choosing the right color, and building detail. Alternatively, I have two animal portraiture classes, one where we learn how to create dark, curly fur texture, and in another one we drew a brown cover layer puppy. Or perhaps if you are interested in landscapes, here we drew a magical house and garden with beautiful floral bushes and a stunning vine covered roof. Don't forget to follow my Instagram wiktoriamikoart, or my website wiktoriamiko.com to find my details and see more of my artwork. That is all from me. Again, thank you so much for watching my class. I really do hope that you enjoyed it and found it helpful. I am looking forward to seeing your art and answering any questions you may have. Thank you again, and happy creating.