Soft pastel realism on Hahnemuhle Velour

Aug 26

Cat eyes | softpastel on velour | 20x30cm

I adore working on Hahnemuhle Velour now, but I really had to practice and experiment to get the hang of working on this surface. The beautiful results of other artists I saw online, particularly by Emma Colbert, made me push through. Once you get the hang of working on this paper it is an absolutely lovely surface and it will give you beautiful results and a lot of depth. And it feels so soft, it’s almost like you’re petting the animal you’re painting.

My favorite pastels for working on velour are Unison soft pastels and Terry Ludwig. I also really like working with Rembrandt soft pastels for details, but only after you’ve scraped off that hard shiny layer that comes on their new sticks.

Here are some of the lessons I learned for trying to achieve realism on this surface:

Detail of squirrel. The arrows show where you can see the indentations.

It is not easy to sketch on velour because you cannot erase mistakes. So it might be easier to sketch on a different piece of paper and then transfer your line drawing to the velour (for example by covering the backside of your sketch with a layer of pastel and then going over the lines). But watch out! Don’t press too hard when transferring your sketch to your final paper or it will leave an indentation (see the squirrel detail on the side). For the portrait of the Mountain woman I sketched directly onto the velour paper using just the grid points.
Rub each of your layers of pastel into the paper, particularly the lower ones. This will enable you to layer on top. I will continue to push the pigment into the paper, also for later layers, but it will become more of a tap than rubbing. Because there is quite a bit of pastel dust coming off in these early layers, I do sometimes wear a dust mask.
The velour will eat your pastels if you try to make a large background in only a few colors. I tend to use my pastel on the side for these areas. The advantage is that this will give you some nice sharp edges for painting the reflected light from your background on your subject in later stages of the painting process. I don’t notice that my pastels are used up as quickly when painting the subject. Maybe because the main subject tends to be more of a build up of different colors and layers.
Pick brighter colors than you think you need (or than you would on pastelmat), because rubbing the colors into the paper will make them loose intensity.
Don’t expect much of your pastel pencils. I have never gotten the hang of using pencils on this surface. I do use them a little, but mainly for cleaning up edges, adding some fly away hairs and getting the soft pastel pigment in the right place. When I use pencils it is usually at a later stage when there are already some layers of pastel on the paper. This makes it a bit easier to get them to give off color. You still have to press relatively hard which can be scary on an almost finished work.
Work large! It is more difficult to get detail with the large sticks so it helps to have a larger sheet of paper. The cat eyes (above) were around A4 size, which is much larger than life. Except for the little squirrel, all my work on velour is relatively large. However, it usually also is a bit quicker compared to pastelmat because I try to focus on the illusion of detail rather than putting in each pore or hair. You can get the illusion of detail with some well placed dots. If you look closely at the portrait of the mountain woman you can see that many of the brightest highlights are just a collection of simple light colored dots. Stepping away often really helps (which is something I need to practice more myself). If you have space, putting a mirror behind your chair also seems to work.
Enjoy the process and the results! Below I’ve added some more examples of my work on velour.