Soft Pastels - When and how to use fixative for a wider dynamic range
Sign up for the course: https://enricodecenzo.com/corso-pastelli
Advantages and Limitations of Soft Pastels Part 2
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Among the flaws or limitations of this technique is the fact that pastel is made of unsaturated pigment, meaning it isn't saturated with a binder like oil, egg, or gum, etc., so it retains a slightly lower tone, meaning it doesn't reach the depths of tone, for example, an ultramarine blue, which without a binder looks like this. In pastel, it will be like this and won't achieve the color we could achieve by wetting this powder. The problem is that if we wet this pigment with oil, it will retain that darker, deeper tone that it would certainly retain with linseed oil, egg, resins, or other mediums.
So, how can we overcome this problem in pastel?
There are a few tricks to maintaining these darker tones to get these darker tones. One that I don't particularly like, but which I often use in pastel when I don't have a lot of dark tones, is to use black, black mixed with other tones, but this still doesn't look very nice.
Another way could be to draw the darker areas and fix them.
The problem, in this case, is that the light tones also fade, and the pastel loses its vibrancy.
So the technique, the trick, is that if we have many dark areas that we want with a deeper tone and achieve the final tone without using black, we can use a fixative. However, this must be done when the pastel is, let's say, somewhere in between.
Then continue with the light tones and leave it raw, that is, without further fixing, which will broaden the dynamic range, meaning the light tones are brought closer.
We're speaking almost in photographic terms.
I don't know if you know what a histogram looks like: the highlights are brought to the maximum light level, and the same goes for bringing the darks to the maximum.
This is a way to achieve this result with a wider dynamic range, because otherwise we wouldn't have to use black or the various fixatives used for pastels.
We would have a histogram. I always refer to photographic terms because they're very well known now.
For those who study photography even a little, the histogram, and we would have a missing portion of blacks, but we would easily reach the maximum light levels because we didn't use fixative.
If we use fixative on everything, we will have blacks that will fill this missing area on the left side of the histogram, but we will have missing whites because the tone is significantly lowered, and this is a bad thing because both the midtones, the midtones, and the highlights would be excessively lowered.
So we can use either technique, but in the case of this apple, I didn't use fixative, but simply used a bit of black in the shadowed areas to achieve a deeper tone, so to speak.
In short, it depends; you have to think about what you're doing.
If I need to, I'll probably study a suitable technique for using fixative, otherwise I'll use a trick like adding black to achieve the same result, but without using fixative, which would ruin the overall drawing.