Pastel Brands and Materials

Pastel Brands and Materials  

See the new page here at Pastel Workshop: Pastel Supplies.  It provides a resource when you are researching or reviewing pastel materials, to include major brand soft pastels, paper, and miscellaneous materials.  I will be updating this page as needed, and plan to list major catalog retailers next.

Box Wars

Guerrilla Pastel Carrier - Judson's

Dakota Deluxe Traveler

To be ready for many upcoming road and air trips, I decided to upgrade my travel system for carrying the sticks.  Now I own one each from the two competitors, the Judson's Guerrilla Pastel Carrier and the Dakota Pastel Carrier. I have already taken the Judson's box on one trip to California.  It worked brilliantly as a carry-on and did the job of protecting and organizing my pastels.   

One thing I liked better about the Judson product is the long, narrow aspect of the box.  It fits better on my Mabef Field Easel, given that the narrow box allows me to stand closer to the task, and seems plenty stable.

The plastic inserts are a good idea, but I always vote for wood over plastic.  Call me an aesthete, but wood is gentle on the soft pastels.  Plastic attracts dust and hair, and is, well, cheesy.  But, I allowed that a guy could ditch the plastic boxes if he needed to.  These plastic boxes are well made, and I really enjoy the finger hole cutout design. The Judson boxes (I have a ThumBox that I took to Italy) are light and strong.  They have heirloom-quality niceness.

Next, I bought the product from Dakota Pastels, who are my favorite cataloger for pastel needs.  The Deluxe Traveler is a thick, beefy, Beech wood box.  I chose the smaller size of two options, to save space when I go by air.

The Dakota product uses the older method of securing the sticks under a foam-lined lid which is held down by thumb swivel latches.  I have seen artists who lose these over time, so that is one of my theoretical problems with the design.  Can't complain about the quality, though.  Always top notch from Dakota.

Usually my Dakota cartons arrive from across state in superior condition.  They positively know how to pack pastels, paper and equipment the right way.  Except this time, they didn't!  The box was slightly too shallow to accommodate the pastel carrier, and so one end of the shipping carton was caved-in a little.  The worse thing is when your pastels are floating around in transit, which is the way I found my new Senneliers (on sale this month in open stock). The tape had come unhinged and the Sennie boxes were loose in the carton. Fortunately, the three-per boxes, which are foam lined, did the job of protecting my new sticks.

After the next couple of trips, I will let you know how these pastel carriers perform.  I know I'll be having fun using these great pastel boxes!

Guerrilla Pastel Carrier

Dakota Deluxe Traveler

Detail Didact

Detail from Route Step...Casey Klahn

Soft pastels are not very appropriate for drawing details. Choose pencils and hard pastels for smaller details. Here are five tips for the detail-oriented pastel artist.

1. Decide ahead of time whether your picture will be finished as a painting or as a drawing. The difference to me is more about lost lines and edges versus outlines. Either result may be achieved with pencils, charcoal and hard pastel. But, keep track of your goal.
   
2. Sharpen your crumbly pastel pencils the old fashioned way. Shave a small portion of the business end of the wooden case from back to front to expose a small tip of pastel. Make sure you get it exposed all around. I use an X-Acto Knife for this. Now, sand the point with a sandpaper sharpener. I re-use mine by stapling hardware store sandpaper to the old board.
   
3. The bigger Derwent Set may be my favorite because it has three values for most of the colors. And I like the consistency.
   
4. Don't forget the invaluable General White Charcoal pencil. Also vine charcoal and compressed charcoal sticks, the latter also comes in white.
   
5. Hard pastels may pleasantly surprise you with the intensity of some pigments. They are traditionally used for blocking in lightly, but I urge you to try them over soft pastels occasionally. The effects are better than many other tools used for moving around and shaping soft pastel.

Detail from Route Step...Casey Klahn

More than enough knowledge on sharpening pencils-Link. Warning: doll defacement shown.

Five for Friday

Contaminate!

Poly Vinyl Acetate Sizing

Basic pastel tips:

1. Contaminate the tip of a pastel stick with another color from your work and begin your marks with this. Any continuity of color throughout the picture plane is useful. Michael Chelsey Johnson recently alluded to color continuity when he posted about the "mother color" methods.
   
2. Use PVA to cover areas with what is essentially a liquid "patch". It may save a work from the dustbin!
3. I like to keep my harder, square pastels separate from my medium soft and soft pastels. I use the two and three drawer boxes offered at various retailers, such as the ones from from Dakota Pastels. They are noted as STORAGE ONE, TWO and THREE, respectively. (I tried to give this link to Daniel Smith, but their links always seem to break!) The main reasons for me trying to give it to them is that they are local to me, and I think that I have bought two of these boxes from DS. They tend to be the higher quality ones, and I have seen poor knock -offs of the same boxes elsewhere. I would trust DS or Dakota for these.
   
4. While we're on the subject of organizing our palette, I also like to keep my grays in a different box. Much more about grays next Friday, when I can spiff up some photos and illustrations to go with.
5. My method of handling dust that drops directly off the paper is to tilt my upright drawing board a little forward on the easel, and to place a piece of mat board under my drawing board. Further, I score the mat board and fold it slightly so as to make a trough out of it. I also tape the score cut with 2" clear tape to prevent build up in the cut and to make it last. Then, when the trough is a little full, I tip the "tailings" into a mason jar and save them to make new pastel sticks with.
   

Note that I've shrunk the tips project to five tips instead of ten and named it: "Five for Fridays". In the first several installments I will endeavor to make these my own personal tricks that I feel don't get exposure in other tips and techniques web pages, and that I use consistently myself. Many of them I have picked up at workshops, or stumbled upon somehow in my studio.

Pastel Pencils

When I did this image of the iconic mountain (where I used to mountain guide) I was struck by how much I relied upon pencils and hard pastels.


The pastel pencil is indispensable for doing little realist works. I have 2 sets of Derwents, and two sets of Faber-Castells, and a drawer full of open stock of the same. And don't forget the General charcoal white pencil.