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.