Drawing Rocks in Pastel Pencils

Gabriele has sent me her painting of a cute Snow Leopard and has asked for help with the rocks. She also sent me a separate photo of the rocks she has tried to copy on her painting but as you can see this hasn't quite come off.The main problem here is the over use of the blending process. Whilst I would certainly have blended the first couple of colours such as 101 and 230, after that very little blending is required. Additional colours like 233, 169, 140, 181 and just a touch of 199 would be added on top of the blended base colours with just a little blending with a colour shaper to push these colours into them. But by and large leave them unblended to create the textured effect.Rocks are notoriously difficult and much practice is required to get it right, however this is an ideal example of using spare paper to practice this technique on before attempting it on the original painting.Just to give you an idea of how good this could look I have superimposed a small section of the photograph into the bottom left corner Gabriel’s painting above.