No software on this on, well not much anyway. So the how to and why of this one is this:
After Pixie I wanted to take another stab at doing a deck. An All Hallows deck was something I wanted to do but the one Melissa is working on is so fab I didn’t really want to go that route. Having been to Mexico and loving the Day of the Dead I thought it would be fun to try this. I did look around at the Day of the Dead decks out there and found that the style I really wanted to do had not been done so I started.
I love the look of pastels and have always wanted to play with them so I bought a set at the local art supply shop along with some construction paper. I think I spent about $10 on the set. This was to give me an idea as to if I could do this before I got REAL pastels because I really have NEVER used them or drawn much freehand before. I felt that this style would work because it is whimsical and provided I could come up with a basic style I would be fine.
Now for those that have no clue what pastels are here is a brief rundown. There are two kinds of pastels soft and oil. Oil pastels are adult crayons. They have deep colors with thick, bright colors. Soft pastels are very much like REALLY colorful chalk that has a rich, dense line. They are almost like watercolors you can draw with. You want to use a paper that ‘has teeth’ to it because the texture of the paper is what gives the image it’s depth. Construction paper is a type that that will do this. Another great thing about using soft pastels is that they are amazing to use on colored backgrounds. If I was to use pencils or paints on say an orange piece of paper it would be very hard to not get the orange to show through, but the pastels are so opaque as to be able to blot out all color under them. After about 20 min of playing with them I was hooked. The only real issue I was having was that they really are pieces of chalk. They make big broad strokes. I wanted to work on a size I could scan into my computer so that gave me at most 11x14 and it was WAY to small to be working with the size lines that the regular soft pastel chalk would make. Enter now into the day the soft pastel pencil.
At the local art supply store (which is only a 5 min drive up the road..dangerous.) they have the these chalk pencils. Soft pastel chalk pencils...that you can sharpen. Well they are an absolute horror to sharpen because the tips are very soft and ALWAYS are breaking. I have 4 different sharpeners in order to get these things sharpened, and they always need to be sharpened. But these gave me the ability to work on an 8x11 piece of paper.