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Pastel – Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Pastel?

Pastel is pigment that has been combined with a liquid binder such as a gum to form a paste that is shaped into sticks and allowed to dry. The result is similar in appearance to colored chalk, although most pastels contain no actual chalk - just pigment and gum. The amount and type of binder present determines whether the pastel will be classified as hard or soft; most pastellists rely more on soft. There is also oil pastel, which is similar in some ways, but since the binder is a mixture of wax and oil, the texture is entirely different - much like a soft crayon.

Pastel as a painting medium is several centuries old, and was first popularized by Rosalba Carriera and Maurice Quentin de La Tour in the early 18th century. Later, the impressionists Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt brought renewed attention to pastel. However, it was not until the 1970's, with the formation of the Pastel Society of America, that current interest in pastel began grow.

Oil pastel has a much shorter history - it was created especially for Pablo Picasso in the mid-20th century, and still has not gained the type of acceptance that soft pastel has.

Pastel requires a surface with some "tooth" for the pigment to stick to. Most pastel artists work on some form of paper - either a paper with a naturally rough texture or else paper that has been prepared with pumice or some other gritty substance. It is also possible to prepare wood or other surfaces for use with pastel. The rougher the surface, the more pastel it can take. Smooth papers generally will take one layer but will not allow you to cover one stroke with another; rougher papers might accept a dozen or more layers.

A finished pastel painting or drawing stays exactly the way it looks when finished, unless it is disturbed. That means it does not change appearance when it dries as a wet media generally does, nor does it crack and yellow with age, as oils have been known to do. On the other hand, the pastel must be framed under glass, as it is easily smudged (even if fixative is applied), and the surface of the painting cannot be cleaned as it can be with an oil painting. So one could say that pastel is one of the most permanent media, but also one of the most fragile. 

Buying Pastels

There are quite a few manufacturers of pastels, some of which are widely available in art supplies stores, and some of which are only available through special order. Many of the latter especially are handmade - the mixing of the paste and the forming of the sticks using no equipment above and beyond what you might find in your average home kitchen. And in fact, many artists make their own pastels.

Pastels usually come not only in a range of different hues, as do paints, but also in several values of each hue. This is simply because you cannot mix colors on a palette. If you want a light blue, you do not mix white and blue - you reach for a light blue stick, which is usually composed of a mixture of white and blue pigments. A manufacturer might offer anywhere from three to ten different values of a given hue - usually one at full pigment strength, one mixed with black to darken the color, and several mixed with varying amounts of white to lighten it. Some manufacturers - notably Unison - use a different scheme to organize their selection, but the effect is similar. Oil pastel is somewhat easier to mix through blending on the surface and tends to come in only one value per color. Frankly, I find this unacceptable - blending white and blue oil pastel on the surface does not produce the same results as mixing white and blue oil paint on a palette. Only Holbein, in their professional line, makes several values of each color, to my knowledge.

Pastels from the major manufacturers are available in single sticks arranged in bins at stores as well as pre-packaged into sets. A set intended for beginners might contain between 12 and 40 sticks. Unfortunately, this is not usually enough of a selection to allow you to have much control of the color - especially the value - in your painting. With wet media like oil or watercolor, it is not uncommon to see professional painters with fewer than 10 tubes of paint in their kits, but pastellists often have hundreds if not thousands. Since pastels tend to run $2 - $4 per stick (somewhat less when purchased in sets), pastel is one of the more expensive media to get started with if you want to do it right. However, I am going to try to offer some guidance to show you how to get started without spending a fortune and without compromising too much.

First, sets composed of half sticks can often be good deals, allowing you a greater selection of colors for a given price. A set of 50 half sticks is likely to be much more useful to a beginner than a set of 25 full sticks. Half a stick of pastel is as good as a whole stick for most purposes, except of course it will not last as long. Many pastel artists deliberately break their sticks anyway; a half stick is often a better size for applying side strokes, and you can fit more of them in your kit if you plan to paint on location. By the time you start to use up half sticks of pastel from a set, you should have a pretty good idea of how much you like the medium.

Lately, I have begun buying my pastels from open stock - meaning the individual sticks in the bins. It is more expensive this way, but I get exactly the colors I want. And now that I have some experience with pastel, I have a good idea of what colors I really use. Whether you buy from open stock or buy sets, it is worth considering what colors you are actually getting.

In general, I gravitate toward more intense colors, using the theory that you can always dull a color with white, black or its complement, but you can't make it any brighter. I generally use a warmer and cooler version of each hue of the color wheel represented, and at least three values of each - dark, middle, and light. This means I have at least three values each of a warmer (more orange) and a cooler (more violet) red, a warmer (more red) and a cooler (more blue) violet, and so on. Then I also include a few values of some duller colors also arranged around the color wheel - a dull blue, a dull green, a dull yellow, and so on. So my basic starting set would have three values each of twelve color wheel colors and six dulled colors, for a total of 54 sticks.

In practice, through experience, I have learned that some of these colors are less useful to me - I do not really see a significant difference between a redder and a yellow orange, for example. However, I can easily distinguish, and regularly look for, three different temperatures of violet and of green. And as a portrait painter, I cannot help but include more than one dull red. Also, I find that while three values of each color is a minimum , I am happier if I have four or five values of some colors. As of this writing, I am using a set I put together from Rembrandt, Sennelier, Prismacolor (or Nupastels) and Mungyo open stock that consists of 380 colors. Why do I have so many pastels if i could more than likely get the same resuls with just 54? i think skin tones looks fresher with fewer layers. Although lovely shades can be obtained by layering different colors, there are also many variables in skin and hair color that don't become apparent until you observe the subject carefully. Hispanics lean toward olive colors. Fair haired Europeans usually more require shades of pink and light blue, while East Indians may have a subtle yellow cast to their skin.

Note that permanence can be a concern with any painting medium. Manufacturers often product color using pigments they know to be not very lightfast - meaning the color will fade noticeably over the years - because they know some artists really like that specific color. I try to choose colors known to be more permanent. You can find permanence ratings on the sticks themselves for most brands, or in color charts prepared by the manufacturer and often available for free.

There are a number of online sources for pastels, both in open stock and in sets, and these are usually cheaper than local art stores. But especially if you plan to buy from open stock, I definitely recommend buying from an art store where you can see and try out the sticks first. Art stores almost never have an issue with people testing pastels.

Pastel Brands

Here are some brands of pastel that I use or have used in the past.

Great American Artworks

These are generously sized and consistently soft pastels that are among my favorites. They are difficult to find in open stock, but they do have a variety of different sets available - not just one in each size. If I could have found these in open stock where I could really study the colors (color charts are never accurate enough), I might have chosen this brand for my own set.

Gallery or Mungyo

A newer brand of pastels, these are made in Korea, and are very inexpensive compared to some of the other brands. They can be purchased in sets or in open stock and the range of colors is quite good. I haven't experimented with these very much but the ones I have used are great for laying in beginning color.

Nupastel

This is a hard pastel, and available in only one value of each color - although there are a lot of colors, some of which probably are just tints of other colors. I like to start a painting with Nupastel, because they do not fill up the tooth of the paper as quickly, allowing for more layers. They are also useful toward the end of a painting if you need to lay in some very darks, although care must be used not to knock off previous layers of "softer" pastel.

Rembrandt

This is probably the most popular brand in the US, because it is so widely available, and comparatively reasonably priced - single sticks are usually less than $3. I like the color selection quite a bit, but I find the consistency varies widely. Some sticks are so hard as to be useless, while others approach Schmincke in softness.

Sennelier

This is one of the most respected brands of pastel on the market - one of the softest, and the largest selection of color, with up to ten or more tints of many colors. They do have a tendency to crumble when you least expect it, though. I save these for the final stages of a painting, as they are so soft they smudge easily if another layer is applied over them.  

Schmincke

This is a favored brand- extremely soft, with only a few exceptions in some colors, yet for the most part they do not suffer the crumbling problem I see with Sennelier. 

Unison

This is another great pastel, handmade in England. They are only slightly less soft than Schmincke, even less prone to crumbling, and perhaps even a bit bigger. The full intensity colors are stunning, although the selection of dulled colors is perhaps not as impressive as Schmincke. They are also the priciest widely available pastel around - over $4 a stick usually.

Winsor & Newton

On paper, these pastels seem great - they are inexpensive, the color selection in the color charts makes sense, and they claim to be being soft (but not too soft) and relatively dust free. The reality is, the sticks are harder than most other soft pastels, most of the colors look faded in comparison to other brands, and there are very few real darks. Plus, they seem if anything dustier than other brands of comparable harness. I almost never hear of other artists saying they use these - unlike the other brands I have listed, which all have their fans. This seems odd to me, since they are so well respected in other media.

Yarka

These are hard pastels, roughly comparable to Nupastel but round. They do not seem to be as popular, although I am not sure if there is a reason for that beyond the fact that Nupastel has been widely available in the US for longer.

Storage And Organization

One of the unique problems associated with pastel is storage and organization. This is an issue for a number of reasons - the sheer number of sticks a pastel artists uses, their fragility, and their tendency to color all they touch. Keeping them in their original boxes, which are usually foam cushioned with individual slots for each stick, is great if space is not a concern, but this might not be a great option for traveling. Art stores sell plastic ArtBin containers with slots for pastels that keep them separated without taking up much room, but the slots will not fit the larger pastels such as Schmincke and Unison. Many pastellists use boxes that are lined top and bottom with foam but do not have individual slots for each stick; instead, the pressure of the top against the bottom when the lid is closed keeps the pastels secure, and rubbing against the foam also helps clean the pastels. Not having separation between the sticks allows you to fit more in a smaller space, and they still stay mostly organized, although some shifting is bound to occur. There are a number of companies who makes boxes of this sort.

Another option is to keep the sticks in a container filled with ground rice or cornmeal. This helps cushion the pastels during transport and keeps them cleaner than other storage methods, but obviously keeps them completely disorganized. You can use a mesh basket or laundry bag as a sifter - the pastels go in the basket or bag, which is placed in the container and then filled with the rice or cornmeal. When you are ready to use them, you lift the sifter out of the container, and the rice or cornmeal stays behind.

Surfaces

As I mentioned earlier, pastel requires a surface with enough tooth to hold the pastel, but there are many options.

The traditional paper for pastel is Canson Mi-Teintes, which looks and feels more or less like the colored construction paper we used as children, but it is of archival quality, meaning the colors will not fade, and the paper will not deteriorate. I use this paper for most of my paintings due to the wide selection of colors available. The two sides of this paper have very different textures. Most pastellists use the back side, which has no discernable pattern. The front side has a grid-like pattern not unlike a window screen that some pastellists use for effect - the texture will usually show through in a finished painting.

Today, many artists use Wallis sanded paper, which is, as the name implies, essentially sandpaper. It can take a lot of pastel, but it also wears the sticks down quickly, and this paper is fairly expensive. Also, it is more difficult to create a soft edge on sanded paper than on less heavily textured surfaces. There are other textured surfaces available, including sanded papers from Art Spectrum and Schmicke and a less sandy but nonetheless textured paper from Sennelier.

Most people say you should work on a colored surface, and this is good advice for a couple of reasons. For one thing, some paper is likely the show through in the final painting, and you can take advantage of that by choosing a background color to harmonize with the painting. Also, it is easier to judge values on a colored surface - light colors look deceptively dark when applied to white. 

Making Marks

One of the nice things about pastel is that you do not really have to be told how to use it - it feels familiar already. It seems to me that many books on pastel spend an inordinate amount of space describing different ways of using the sticks - drawing with the tip, scribbling, using the side to make larger strokes, and so forth. And you can either use your finger or some other device to blend the strokes or not. You can figure out for yourself what works for you.

I tend to use a lot of crosshatching and layering to achieve the color I want. Recently, I discovered ArtSpectrum Primer, which is a textured ground available in several tints. The ground can be left as is, to show the texture of the brushstrokes used to apply it or sanded smooth. When pastel is applied to this type of surface it is much less likely to flake off and an almost infinite number of layers can be applied. 

Framing

Another problem unique to the pastel artist has to do with framing. Not only must pastel paintings be framed under glass for protection, but the painting must be separated from the glass to avoid getting pastel dust on the glass, and if you use a mat around the painting, as is traditional for works on paper, you have to find a way to keep pastel dust off the mat as well. Fixative only goes so far in keeping pastel on the painting; most pastel artists do not rely on it for this purpose, although they may use it during the course of a painting to allow them to add more layers when the tooth of the paper starts to fill.

I sometimes frame my pastels with no mat - I guess I simply do not see the point when mats are not usually seen on oil paintings, and it is easier and cheaper to frame without a mat. I use clear plastic spacers available from Frametek around the edge of the glass to keep the painting and the glass apart, and I paint on rigid surfaces when possible so the painting can just stand up in the frame like an oil painting would - no need to mount it to something else.