|
|
The Outside Shore
|
 |
| Into The Woods (Pastel, 14x11") |
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.
 |
| Fair Territory (Oil Pastel 9x12") |
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 - remember from the introduction that I am defining a painting as anything built from shapes rather than lines, and pastel allows either approach - stays exactly the way it looks when finished, unless disturbed. That means it does not change appearance when it dries as wet media generally do, nor does it crack and yellow with age, as oil often does. 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 on an oil painting. So one could say that pastel is one of the most permanent media, but also one of the most fragile. Oil pastel is somewhat less fragile, but the surface will never cure in the way it does for oil painting.
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 pastellists deliberately break their sticks in two anyhow; 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.
Personally, though, I prefer 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.
My personal philosophy on color selection is admittedly a bit unusual. If you look at my paintings, you will see that I am not overly concerned with reproducing colors of nature precisely. In general, I gravitate toward more intense colors. As a result, although I mostly paint landscapes, my color selection tends to be similar regardless of subject matter. Basically, I like to have 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 landscape painter, I cannot help but include more than one dull green. Also, I find that while three values of each color is a minimum (except for yellow, where "dark yellow" does not really exist), 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 Schmincke open stock that consists of 89 colors.
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, unlike the situation with paints.
Here are some of the brands of pastel I have tried, along with my comments on them.
These are generously sized and consistently soft pastels that are among my favorites. They have a large variety of different sets available - not just one in each size. They are somewhat more difficult to find in open stock than most of the other brands mentioned here, but they are more widely available now than they were a couple of years ago when I was putting together my set. Next time I may well go with these.
Their soft pastels are relatively hard, but it is their oil pastels that are special. They are the only manufacturer I know of to make different values of each color available, allowing me to build a set along the same lines as with soft pastel. In fact, my Holbein oil pastel set is very similar to my Schmicke soft pastel set, although I find I can get by with fewer values of each color because you can create different values by blending to some degree (just not as much as the other manufacturers seem to think). The sticks are square in profile, not round, which I find sort of nice - they do not roll around so much. Also paperless, which I find a plus - the first thing I do with any other brand is remove the label so I can make side strokes.
Terry Ludwig lives not too far from me in the Denver area and I got to see his pastel making operation in his basement, which was a blast. Everything is done completely by hand. I love the soft consistency of his pastels, and they are also square and paperless, which is a plus. He has a system of color mixing that is unique, with his full selection consisting of every possible combination of two different pigments of the ten or so he uses. Unfortunately, he does not actually produce all of these colors any more - just the colors that go into his sets, and I was looking for a fairly specific set of colors. These are also hard to come by in open stock. If you are looking for pre-packaged sets, though, I would definitely give these the highest recommendation.
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. A lot of people like to start a painting with Nupastel or other hard pastels, because they do not fill up the tooth of the paper as quickly, allowing for more layers. I personally do not bother; I work loosely enough that filling the tooth is not usually a problem. Besides, the extra binder used to make them so hard makes the color less intense when it comes off the stick. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for these, as my very first art supplies were a set of gray Nupastels I got in junior high school. I still find this set useful as a sketching tool.
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.
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. I find them overrated, myself, and I find I am not alone in this. They are smallish compared to the other major brands, and they tend to fall apart into useless crumbs when unwrapped, at least here in Colorado. Perhaps in France, where they are made, the humidity holds them together better. Their oil pastels are also highly respected - Sennelier is the company that invented the medium for Picasso. The color selection is not unlike Nupastel - many different colors, only one value of each, although some colors do appear to be tints of others. They are very soft - again, perhaps, too soft for my taste.
This is my favorite pastel all-round - 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. I also like the generous size and great color selection. Sometimes, looking at the bins, you get the impression that the colors are dull, because Schmincke does make a large number of dulled colors, but their full intensity colors are as bright as any other pastels, and their dull colors are unusually beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
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 pastellists use, 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.
Since I am primarily a plein air painter, transportability is the main issue for me. I actually keep my pastels inside my easel - I have a Yarka Russian field easel, which is similar to but smaller and lighter than the French box easels that many other artists use. The inside compartment of either easel is basically just a box, and I line it with foam and/or batting used for quilting just like the commercial boxes. The compartment in the Yarka easel is divided into five sections, so I cut foam into pieces to fit each and use a combination of batting and foam on top. When the easel is closed, the pastels are held securely, and when I open it, the pastel are all laid out and ready to use. Then I have only two things to carry to my painting location - the easel itself and my drawing board.
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. 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.
 |
| Chatfield (Pastel, 8x10") |
Many pastellists these days are using 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 not cheap, either. 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.
 |
| Clyde's Eye View (Pastel, 16x20") |
You can also make your own textured surface. I sometimes take a fairly heavy paper such as printmaking paper and coat it with a 2:1 mixture of gesso and pumice, which creates a somewhat sandy surface that is not as demanding on the pastel as Wallis paper. By applying the primer yourself, you can also control the texture of the brushstrokes used to apply the primer, which adds another textural element that is often visible in the finished painting. This same primer can be used on masonite or other surfaces. Masonite has the advantage of being rigid, meaning it can serve as its own drawing board on the easel and its own backing board in framing. On the downside, a large painting on masonite and framed under glass is heavy.
My favorite surface right now is actually mat board - acid free museum board, in particular. It has a texture not unlike the back side of Canson, but perhaps a bit more velvety, making hard edges about as problematic as soft edges are on sanded paper. The rigidity aids in framing, although it is not really rigid enough to frame without additional backing, and a drawing board is still useful on the easel. I also use the back side of Canson paper, which I either use as is or mount to a board first.
Most people say that 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. That said, I like working on white. Soft pastel is supposedly opaque, but I still find that it is easier to achieve bright, rich color on white, and creating dull color is not especially a problem. And if you work from big to small and do a block in first, you will have that white mostly covered soon enough, so judging value is not a problem.
 |
| Lilacs, Front Yard (Pastel, 14x11") |
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 a lot of 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 short side strokes, unblended, so the individual splotches of color remain visible in the finished painting.
 |
| House At Cheesman (Pastel, 8x11") |
Sometimes, I use scribbly tip strokes more consistently in a painting, and there will often be a noticeable diagonal bent to them, because I usually move my hand in the same direction when making these strokes. I am left handed, so each stroke is like a "\" character; when a right handed person uses the technique, the strokes look more like "/".
One thing I do think is worth discussing are the differences between soft pastel and oil pastel, since I find a lot of pastel artists expressing curiosity about oil pastel. There are some big advantages to oil pastel over soft pastel in theory - oil pastel is dust free, less prone to smudging, and works well on a wider variety of surfaces, because it is not so sensitive to tooth. Actually, too much tooth can be a problem, because it takes longer to completely cover the paper with oil pastel than soft pastel, and too much tooth only exacerbates this. For this reason, I find that oil pastel is not so good for working large, unless you have a lot more patience than I do. I typically spend around two hours on a plein air landscape, and while I can more or less complete a 18x24" painting comfortably in that time in soft pastel, it's a struggle to get an 11x14" paper covered in oil pastel.
An unexpected effect of this looser coverage has to do with the way I work, and might not apply to everyone. Whereas with soft pastel, after I block in the big shapes, I immediately have something I can appreciate at an abstract level, with oil pastel, it looks like a bunch of meaningless scribbles for at least an hour before the picture starts to materialize. Another thing I prefer about soft pastel in this respect is that it is water soluble. Not only does this make cleanup easier, but it means I can take a brush wet with water to my initial block-in to make that underpainting even more solid. With oil pastel, you need turpentine or mineral spirits to achieve the same effect.
Oil pastel is translucent enough that I recommend working on white; otherwise, your light colors end up looking dulled by the paper color. Another trick - if you know you're going to want a light area somewhere, cover that region first with white oil pastel. The reason is that the first layer of color will effectively stain the paper; while you can scrape away layers of oil pastel, you cannot completely remove that first layer. When you inevitably find yourself needing to scrape off some darker color that has intruded into your lights, if that dark is the first thing that went down, you are stuck with a dark stain on the paper that you cannot really cover sufficiently with a light color because of the translucency of oil pastel. If white went down first, scraping will get you back to that white "stain", which allows you to put other light colors down easily.
Oil pastel is sensitive to heat. You cannot store them anyplace too hot - watch out if you plan to leave them for any length of time in your car during the summer! They can also start to melt and fall apart in use more when it is especially hot out.
My least favorite thing about oil pastel is how dirty the sticks get in use. If you touch a yellow stick to a blue spot on a painting, sometimes it seems almost as much blue gets on the stick as yellow gets on the painting. I usually use no more than 10-12 sticks on a given painting, and by the end, they all have a dark film over them that is kind of a pain to wipe off. The only way to avoid this would be to never layer, but that wouldn't work at all for me.
The actual way that oil pastel goes down and blends on the paper is slightly different between oil pastel and soft pastel, but for me, these differences are pretty insignificant. My basic working method is the same for oil and soft pastel, and the results look almost indistinguishable. I have no problem recommending oil pastel for artists concerned about dust and not concerned with working large. I suppose one other thing worth mentioning is that oil pastel paintings are usually not accepted in shows sponsored by pastel societies.
Another problem unique to pastellists 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 pastellists 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 like to 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.
For the curious, I am including the details on my own pastel set. After using hundreds of sticks from a variety of different brands, I decided to try using a more limited selection. For the sake of consistency of color I drew from one brand only, and for texture and color selection, I chose Schmincke. I am using 89 colors, as follows:
|
All content copyright © The Outside Shore Marc Sabatella /
marc@outsideshore.com |
