February General Meeting Notes by Roger Snyder, Secretary

Texas Pastel Society

February 2, 2013

Member Meeting

Meeting started at 10:30 AM at the Tobin Library with 12 members present.
Old Business
Mary Lopez briefly described the upcoming events: The San Antonio Garden show, the Spring exhibit at the Tobin Library and the San Antonio Garden Club exhibit. Sign up sheets were available.

Demonstration: Painting with a Limited Palette by Irene Taylor
Irene had a still life set up with a vase, a ceramic kitten and various pieces of fabric draped on the background.

Irene has used limited palettes for oil painting. She decided to explore the possibility of doing this with pastels. For pastels, she worked with alizarin crimson, lemon yellow, ultramarine blue, black, and white. Discussing color theory, she noted that lemon yellow was selected as an intense yellow. She described the theory of cool and warm blues. Also that for bright colors one should use only two primaries.

With pastels, only limited mixing is possible since the surface selected limits the amount of pastel that can be added. Irene used a pearl Canson paper in the demonstration.

The drawing was started with a series of straight lines. For a symmetrical shape such as the vase, an axis line is necessary. She started painting the vase by laying in the dark background with a light touch using the side of the pastel. The initial background was started with the black and then alizarin crimson was added. The green vase was started with the yellow and blue, adding white for the highlights.

Irene switched to soft pastels and then back to hard and medium pastels for the details. There was a discussion on how much of the edge closest to the light to highlight. Irene noted that, if the entire edge is highlighted the object will look as if it was pasted on. The highlight should be the part that is perpendicular to the light source.

Roger Snyder, Secretary