Jaci Dawn

(hack hack) – I use hair spray instead of an expensive fixative for pastels, a little trick I learned from my high school art teacher. It’s the same thing, just cheaper.

Oh. Did I mention pastels?

I did. Last summer when I had the crazy idea to have a studio, I decided I should spend one hour every day sketching. I bought some cheap pastels & a newsprint art pad and sketched about six times.

I’m back in my little studio and I actually have a bigger project going, but it requires waiting on glue & drying & time. I don’t want to take photos of it until it is finished, so after I applied the glue that needs to cure 24 hours to it, I decided I should do one of those practice sketches in pastels.

I haven’t worked seriously with pastels since high school. That’s 35 years ago, plus. I decided tonight that I remember why.

I smeared & smudged & forgot how all this works together, but eventually began to feel my way forward with a remake of a sketch I did in oil pastels about 3 years ago. It’s one of my animals-transforming-to-faeries sketches (or is it faeries transforming into animals?): a tree-climbing faerie caught in the act of becoming a squirrel (or the other way around).

Here’s the original:

I wasn’t happy with it, so reworking it tonight seemed like an ideal way to work through what I don’t like about the original.

Here’s what I did tonight:

I can see that pastels are not really my preferred media, but I can also see how they benefit me as an artist and will help me grow. For one thing, I have to give up trying to be perfect.

I did not pre-sketch the squirrel in the second rendering. I did it all entirely free-hand, working with my mistakes as I went. That part was fun: seeing how I could handle the mistakes.

I’m not entirely happy with either sketch, but since that is all they are – prelim sketches for an eventual painting – I can afford the mistakes. I can afford to not like them: that’s how I grow.

Here they are side-by-side, just for the heck of it:

I have a very limited palette  of chalk pastels & a more extensive oil pastel palette. I like the arch of the second squirrel’s tail and he looks a little more life-like in pose. The first one looks a little stilted.

Neither one is perfect, but boy were they fun!