A little general stuff about Pastels

Pastel are small sticks of pure colour (pigment) held together with a glue (binder). They are usually about the size of a child's crayon, but can be much bigger.
When you paint with Pastel you can't mix colours, as you would with liquid paints, so each colour has many "tints" shading from dark to light. To make a colour lighter, white chalk is added, to make it darker black is added. So when you are painting you have to select the exact tint you need from a very large tray! 

The largest selection in the world comes from the French maker, Sennelier who have a total collection of 525 distinct tints to choose from! But don't worry, we don't need anything like that to paint a lovely picture!

Pastels, or coloured chalks, and charcoals are our oldest tools for drawing and painting. Charcoal (which is just burnt wood) together with natural earths like Sanguine, were used as far back as Cave Paintings. Pencil (graphite) as we know it didn't come on the scene until the 1760s .... so all the greats like Michelangelo and Raphael used charcoal, sanguine, and early forms of pastel, to sketch and draw. Even oil painting is a newcomer beside pastel!

This is a copy I made of a Raphael drawing, using sanguine just as he did. I have made many such studies, to learn about the techniques of the Old Masters.


One of the favourite ways of using pastel has always been to combine it with charcoal, and to use a coloured paper. This is called charcoal and tint where charcoals give the darks, the paper provides the main middle colour, and a light pastel gives the highlights.
It is the simplest form a restricted palette, and can give a very subtle and restrained effect. 

These are three studies I did using the technique of charcoal and tint. It is a very effective way of giving more "life" than a simple charcoal or graphite portrait, and yet keeping the simplicity of a line drawing .

This leads on to the next ingredient in Pastel - the surface to paint on.

You now have your box of colours, what surface do you paint on? Well, almost anything! The usual surface is paper, and paper with some roughness or "tooth" so that the tiny grains of pastel will catch and be held on the paper's surface. Pastel papers are usually coloured too, it is easier to work on a coloured background. So just as you have a huge selection of pastel colours to choose from, so also you have a wide selection of coloured papers to choose from.

Pots in the Sun
I painted this on a rough sandpaper surface, to give the feel of heavy stoneware pottery

Other unusual surfaces you can buy include,  

• flock -which is just like flock wallpaper, and gives a very soft and fuzzy effect to the pastel and 

•  pastel board  which is just like sandpaper, very rough and will hold lots of pastel, and gives an effect like oil paint, very thick. 

• You can even use watercolour paper. Just paint a background colour to "kill" the white glare. Indeed it has a big advantage - you can colour different areas in differently, pale blue where the sky will be, dark green for the foliage, sandy for the beach etc. Then your pastel will be much quicker to apply, and very effective.