3M to the Rescue

Have you ever worked on a drawing or a pastel painting for days and suddenly discover something you did hours ago is wrong, horribly wrong?

Oh yes, it’s there and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

But there is. Scotch tape or the generic equivalent will many times bring that work back from the dead.

If the problem is in the shading, coloring or drafting you can fix it. This is the part that makes working in a layered material so difficult. Sure you can fix an error because the material isn’t fixed and locked down, but in so doing you may do more harm than good. Erasers smear pencil and what they to pastel is best not mentioned in front of women and small children.

The trick is to find something which will pick up a layer of material without changing the underlying work. The drafting of your project is fine, but some where in shading you just went off the rails. (This happens to me all the time. I’m doing a sketch of a woman or child and in trying to get the shading right so that the face has depth and contour; I give the little darling a five o’clock shadow. Ever see Julia Roberts with a beard? It ain’t a pretty sight. [ Note* Trying to get a local model to let you sketch them is not easily done with a folio of girls who look like the bearded lady at the traveling carnival!])

This is where the tape trick comes in. Take a small strip of tape and press it into the picture where the error lies and when you lift it the top layers of graphite come away with the tape. Works the same with pastels.

The basic difference between the materials is the pencil drawing needs shading to give it a three dimensional look. The pastel drawing uses color in the same way, a subtle change in the light and you have a different color. And by changing the color you create a different shading. Think about flowers. They appear to have many colors in their petals and stems, but if you cut the flower and bring it in so that the light can be focused from one source the color is pretty uniform. It’s the light and shadow which make flowers look so colorful and that’s what the artist paints when they do a flower.

But with pastel building up the right color can be a process of small steps and all it takes is one too many passes and that beautiful leaf becomes a tarted up poster for bug spray. Take a piece of tape and you can lift off that color without smearing the work and viola you’re back in business.

So the next time the phone rings at the wrong moment or the kid sets fire to the kitchen or the dog brings you a nearly dead gift of nature, relax, that last pass with the pencil or the chalk can be gone in a flash.