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Carmella Jarvi: Painting Water with Pastel clip

3,261 views · Published 23 March 2011 · 3:08 · Indexed 6 October 2026

Channel: Journey Art Stuff · 2011 · Howto & Style

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Here's a clip from Carmella Jarvi's DVD, 'Painting Water With Pastel." 

In this segment I'm going to walk you through one of my Women Swimming in Water pastel paintings. This is the series I'm known the best for. I've been working on this for a number of years. I love water but I love the human figure as well and it's just a lot of fun to do. 
So I've started with my newsprint, again the junk paper. You want to warm up. I've got my conti, and I can use the point or the side and basically what I was trying to do was practice what my final image was going to look like.
So now that I'm done with that I'm going to put the conti down and go ahead and pull this off.
Now normally like I said before, I would come in and do a little of the sketching with the color of the paper. That works really well, but for the sake of seeing it on the video I want to show a few of my colors so it's marked in. 
You are seeing basically the way I start. I have shown you how to mount the gator foam on the board, how to pick the color of the paper, I'm doing the complimentary colors, how to start with my pastels over on the table, so I'm now ready to begin. I've warmed up, I've practiced, I'm starting. 
So the whole thing about these toothy pastel surfaces is that you're just starting to lay the pastel in, you're not going to get a lot of thick pastel until you keep adding those layers on. 
So at this point I have the figure blocked in pretty well. I want to go ahead and not worry about details or eyelashes, just forget about that. This figures pretty small but she's big enough I'll be able to make the marks. I want to just start suggesting the form. And like everything I do, you get a little distortion, you're never doing an exact copy of the photograph, it's just my impression. She's down in the water. Let's start with her skin color and just suggest that arm. There's a little bit of her skin down here, I have the leg coming down, so I want to go ahead and suggest that. 
The whole thing about water is that you can see into it, you can see the surface, you can see the reflection of the sky, trees whatever is around. So with water there are multiple things you are looking at. There are also things like if it's a cloudy day you can see into the depths of the water more. If it's a sunny day you see more of the reflection. But even if you don't see under the water you can suggest that in your painting and it makes it look like water. Just a little fyi.

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