Learning to paint with soft pastels, One Year Art Challenge
Soft pastels first appeared in the sixteenth century in Northern Italy. Some people mistakingly refer to them as chalks, but there is a difference. Colored chalk is made by adding colored dyes to natural white chalk. In contrast, good quality soft pastels are made from powdered pigment and a binder. They have a soft buttery consistency and are an excellent tool for quick expressive mark-making. They are a dry medium and are applied directly to paper. Most well-known art brands have a range of soft pastels, but they are not all of equal quality.
At the start of 2021, I decided to learn to paint with soft pastel. I had tried pastel painting many years ago, but without much success. So I was a little wary about trying again, especially as I would document my progress or lack of it on YouTube.
I use mainly Schmincke soft pastels with a few Sennelier pastels. I’ve experimented with a few different papers. One thing I have discovered is the paper you use matters. Pastel papers seem to come in two versions: coated and uncoated. The coated papers have a rough, porous surface, sometimes like fine sandpaper. A porous surface can take several layers of pastel. Uncoated papers are cheaper but can’t handle as many layers. My favorite paper, at the moment, is Pastelmat by Clairefontaine.
I paint mainly landscapes from memory and imagination in a loose impressionistic way.
Some of the finished paintings:
Things I learnt
Soft pastels have their limitations. You can’t mix soft pastels, at least not how you can mix paint, which means you need quite a few pastel sticks in different colours and various shades of each colour. Since pastels are a dry medium, finished paintings are easily damaged. Some people use a fixative to try to protect the finished painting. I don’t because fixatives tend to change the values. For me, the strength of pastels is the immediacy of painting without a brush and the expressive mark-making ability of the pastels.