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what do these paintings share in common ?

Layering for drawings and paintings by Sandrine Pelissier on ARTiful, painting demos
Painting technique / Step by step demonstrations

what do these paintings share in common ?

All these paintings and drawing are done with a variety of media , on paper, yupo paper or canvas, they might be different in style but still they all have something in common. So what do these paintings share in common? It has to do with the technique.

Layering technique : It is what these paintings share in common?

For all of those I used some kind of layering building the colors layer by layer until I found the colors to be the intensity I wanted, and the contrast strong enough, making adjustments and corrections in the process.

You might also like: Layering watercolors to paint clouds and the sea

layering watercolors- what do these paintings share in common

For the watercolors I separate colors into primaries for the first layers, starting with the yellow, then red and blue. I then adjust by adding and removing colors. You can see demonstrations of my technique on this blog. This technique I am using was inspired by the book light up your watercolors layer by layer by Linda Moyer. I modified a bit her technique but basically the idea is the same. I am scrubbing off lots of paint too at the end of my process , which I don’t believe she does. Anyway if you are interested in trying out this way of painting with watercolors, this is an interesting book to read.

For mixed media on canvas I don’t have a systematic approach, I will just add layers and scrub some off until I am satisfied with the complexity of the broken colors. One painting can end up being build of 30 or more layers (I am not counting anymore…)

what do these paintings share in common

With pastels my technique was also inspired by an excellent book I read, Express yourself with pastels by Carole Katchen. She is also layering her pastels with different kinds of strokes, I am using the “squiggling” kind of strokes which I found very effective with pastels.

Finally when drawing with graphite, I usually start by drawing the general shapes with a very light stroke, then will add details and contrast slowly layers by layers, making corrections as I go.

Generally speaking, I think that , whatever your medium and your surface is, proceeding by gradual layering will allow opportunities for corrections and adjustments and produce very interesting effects in terms of colors, contrast and textures.

 

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Comments (2)

  1. Susanne

    Very informative post! Thank you for the book recommendations!

  2. […] What do these paintings and drawings have in common? […]

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