Just started a new #panpastel painting and decided to do a grey layer first to map out the values in the skin. I looked up the grey layer online and some used to call it the dead layer as I suppose it is a little deathly in pallor. The French call it the Grisaille layer which sounds nicer, it means greyness.
Grey is such an important colour to use as we see so much of it in life, both artificial - such as buildings and in nature - lots of grey tones in trees. These greys were all neutral grey which have a lovely warm tone to them.
The next layer I put down is the Verdaccio layer - which is a green undertone
I'm not overly adventurous with the green but I did enjoy seeing the dancers start to come to life a bit more. The panpastels are very translucent compared to the opaqueness of pastel sticks so colours will show through if you don't get heavy handed. The green I used was permanent green which normally is nice for foliage.
From here I will be moving onto mid tones and just have a permanent red, pthalo green, hansa yellow and ultramarine blue to work with - I'll avoid the highlight areas and shadows for the next layer. Then I suspect it will be out with the pastel pencils to do the details - however I hope to follow the same process by sticking to grey, green then mid tones to do the details.
I'll be back to share more later.
Thanks for reading