Introduction:
We will celebrate Earth Day this year by creating vibrant portraits of wildlife with soft pastels. For inspiration we will work from a collection of photographs, what I call a morgue.

Materials:

• Soft pastels
• Pencils and erasers
• Pastel paper at least 11x14 in darker colors
• Spray fixative
• Photographic clippings of wildlife (National Geographic)

Directions:
1. Choose a photograph or a combination of photos to use as a guide. Now sketch the basic layout of your composition. Since we are doing animal portraits, it is important that you choose a composition that tells something about that animal. For example, a portrait of a lion that is looking straight forward conveys a feeling of courage and power while a portrait of that same lion peeking out from jungle vines conveys fear and mystery. A portrait of a bird flying or eating may be more exciting than the same bird sitting on a branch. Decide what you want to emphasize most about your animal and do a preliminary sketch with pencil. Do not get too detailed because we are going to color over it anyway.
2. Color in the entire piece of paper with soft pastels. You can mix complimentary, secondary, tertiary, and analogous colors directly on your paper by blending the pastels with blending stumps, Kleenex, or your fingers.
3. When the painting is done, spray it with a fixative to keep the pastels from falling off the paper.

Artspeech:
Morgue--a collection of files of clippings from magazines, newspapers, or books to be used as inspiration and a guide for a variety of subjects.
Composition--The deliberate quality of the overall placement of elements in a piece of artwork.
Secondary colors--The colors that can be obtained by mixing any two of the primary colors. Red + Blue = Purple, Red + Yellow = Orange, Blue + Yellow = Green.
Complimentary colors--One of a pair of colors that are considered to be in extreme contrast to each other. Red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange. These colors are directly opposite of each other on a color wheel.
Analogous colors--One of a pair of colors that are very alike in tone and are next to each other on a color wheel, i.e. blue and purple, red and orange, orange and yellow, green and blue.
Tertiary colors--any hue produced by a mixture of secondary colors. In pigment mixtures , such colors tend to be dull and dark, usually variations of grays and browns.

Resources:
Adams, Norman and Joe Singer. Drawing Animals. Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1989.
Ambrus, Victor. Drawing Animals. North Light Books, Ohio, 1998.
Mayer, Ralph. The Sharper Collins Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1991.

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