My first sauce drawing:

[Catherine Muhly]

I saw Peggy Baumgaertner do a demonstration in sauce painting (drawing) at the PSOA conference last April, and finally decided to give the medium a try. It's intriguing! My main tool was the kneaded eraser.

[Mike Dodson]

Cathy,

I love this drawing, particularly the lost edges around the head area, gives it a "glow" effect.

Beautiful!

[Linda Brandon]

Oh, Cathy, this is gorgeous work. Well done! I couldn't seem to get this level of detail in the few times I've attempted working in sauce. Can you explain, exactly, how you did this? Did you wet the paper at all?

[Catherine Muhly]

I don't know if you saw Peggy Baumgaertner's demonstration. For me, that was a big eye opener. She ground up the sauce with a mortar and pestle and poured the powder into a black tight, itself a messy undertaking. Then she covered the surface of the paper with a light coating of the sauce-in-the-tight, and then proceeded with drawing, with a kneaded eraser for lighter areas, and with a tortillon or brush, for darks.

I started out that way, too. You can make a kneaded eraser into quite a refined tool if you hold it in your hand long enough to be able to model it. Going lighter was much easier than going darker. I had to smear many coats of sauce to build up areas of dark.

I stayed away from wetting the sauce until I was fairly satisfied with the placement and shapes of the drawing, mindful that once wet sauce dries, it stays. Using a dry brush or tortillon results only in a subtle darkening. Wetting it later, once you're sure you want it, is the best way to procede. Even then, the darkening of the sauce is not radical, and you can put a fresh layer of dry sauce atop the dried wet sauce and repeat the process to deepen the darks.

Applying sauce directly with the stick will give you a dark and not very smearable line. For really dark areas, a little hatching with the sauce stick will do. Don't allow it to get too different from the rest of the drawing.

With sauce, the best way to go is to proceed with caution. I felt as if I were "tickling" the drawing out of the paper, not my usual way of getting started or proceeding. Therefore, I found it to be an intriguing experience.

[Mike McCarty]

Catherine,

Very nice indeed. Would (could) you compare your experience with sauce to a piece of black soft pastel chalk? Do you see any benefit to the sauce in either the "process" or the "finished work?"

[Catherine Muhly]

Mike,

That's a very good question. I know pastel is water soluable, and that I played with that feature in the pastel drawing I have above for critique. Wetted pastel, though is erasable, even if it involves more elbow grease than dry pastel. Dried wetted sauce is harder to erase.

The plus of sauce is most apparent with people who like to work with a light touch. I'd like to see a sauce pencil. It is far easier to remove than to apply sauce. Where I got the sauce wet, as, for instance, in the little floral thingies in the blouse, I was able to put more sauce over that and remove the excess without bothering the previously wetted sauce.

It'd be worth trying out: doing a pastel or charcoal using the same approach as with the sauce. I have to give it a go. Maybe the sauce effects can be had with pastel or charcoal, if the work is approached in the same way. Hm!

Well, like I said at the top, you posed a very good question.

[Mike McCarty]

Thanks for the reply Catherine, if you could humor me for a couple more questions.

I much prefer using soft black pastel chalk to charcoal because I can get much darker values with the pastel. It appears to me that the end product pastel drawing would look very similar to that of the sauce drawing, although I've only seen the sauce on the computer. But from everything I've read about sauce, it appears to be very difficult in the "process" stage.

If you did not use any water, applied the pastel chalk directly to the paper. Then using fingers, brushes, tortillons, and "fixing" the chalk when necessary, do you think the end product would be appreciably different than that of a sauce drawing? Such that it would warrant the additional headaches that I perceive are inherent in the sauce process.

She ground up the sauce with a mortar and pestle and poured the powder into a black tight, itself a messy undertaking. Then she covered the surface of the paper with a light coating of the sauce-in-the-tight, and then proceeded with drawing, with a kneaded eraser for lighter areas, and with a tortillon or brush, for darks.

Would you explain what a "black tight" is, also the term "sauce-in-the-tight?"

[Catherine Muhly]

Mike,

I've got my second sauce drawing in progress; it's going to have lots of very dark darks in it. After that, I'll maybe try out the soft pastel and/or charcoal. You pose an interesting question, which I'll be able to answer when I give the pastel a try. I'm also considering the idea of using a sauce drawing as an underpainting for a pastel, as one of Peggy Baumgaertner's posts mentioned.

I've been primarily painting in oil, and drawing in graphite, and recently in colored pencil. I'm having a go at the sauce, pastels, charcoals for the first time either in a long while, or ever. I'm on a try-out-various-ways-of-making-works-on-paper-binge.

As for the black tights. Those are opaque panty hose. That's what Peggy Baumgaertner said to use. Black tights are made of a blend of cotton and spandex. Anyway, I snipped off a lower part of the leg and put the ground sauce in it. Much of it made it into the sock; the rest, well, I found out what Peggy meant when it's a mess to clean up.

[Catherine Muhly]

Mike,

One more thing. Once you've done the fill the tights with sauce thing, that'll last for quite a while. Through many, many pictures. So it's a headache only at first.

[Linda Brandon]

Cathy,

I read about Peggy's technique and she also (very kindly and patiently) explained the process to me via email, though I didn't see the video. Your work, and a revisitation of Peggy's, has inspired me to give it another go. Maybe I'll try black pastel as well. Keep posting your drawings, please!

Mike,

Most of the complaints about the sauce process have probably come from me. (What's that saying, 'it's a bad workman who blames his tools'?) I pathologically and pathetically pulverized and pounced that peculiar perdurable particulate until I suffered a paroxysm.