A First Layer of Color

Pastel on paper, 7 x 10 inches (18 x 25 cm)

Walt Bartman sometimes paints "straight from the tube," meaning he doesn't mix colors on the palette after squeezing them out of the tube, the usual approach. When mixing colors on the palette it it is hard to equal the same purity of color of paint squeezed straight from the tube, although theoretically possible. The problem with mixing is that your mixture is likely to get contaminated by pigments smeared on your not-perfectly-clean palette or in your not-perfectly-clean brush.

When you paint with pastels you are ALWAYS painting "straight from the tube," because it is not possiple to mix the pigments on a palette. The type of mixing that occurs is called "optical mixing," the most common illustration of which is offset color printing where tiny dots of color are printed next to one another, blending to create a single color in a viewer's mind. This is an exciting way to deliver color because in a pastel painting the pieces of color can be quite large, forcing the eye to focus on each individually, while at the same time the mind attempts to blend them into one simple shade. Painters call this affect "vibration," and, to some extent, it mimics the excitement we feel as we experience the real world around us.