Pastels

Pastels and Charcoals, Continued Pastels Pastels are pigment, chalk, and a binder in stick or pencil (wood encased) form. The binder is usually gum tragacanth. Pastel sticks apply broad swatches of color while pastel pencils draw thin, precise lines. You may use pastels as a opaque or semi-opaque medium. Pastels combine easily with other media such as pencil, crayon, and paints to form mixed media images. Degree of softness Pastels come in soft, hard, or semi-soft sticks and in pencils. The softer the pastel, the more dust produced by heavy strokes. Hard pastels work better on smooth-surfaced paper than softer pastels that require a paper with some tooth. Drawing with Pastels are a drawing medium capable of producing painterly images. When pastels drawing with pastels, you should have stumps or tortillons, a stiff brush, and soft, hard, and kneaded erasers nearby. The paper you select must have tooth. Hold pastels as you would pencils. Drawings generally proceed from dark to light. Shading and color gradations are made by crosshatching or overstroking pastel strokes until you produce the desired effect. When drawing with oil pastels, use a brush lightly moistened with turpentine for blending. Pastel finishing At the completion of the drawing, spray over the entire image with fixative. If the drawing loses all highlights, the fixative was too strong and you will have to redraw the highlights. Storing pastels When storing pastels, separate the drawings with a sheet of acetate. Avoid surface pressure and lateral movement. Although sprayed with a fixative, the surface of a pastel drawing may still rub off and smear. Oil chalk Oil chalk has the appearance of pastels but, it contains oil. Do not use oil chalk with pastels. The oil binder may leech into the pastel paper leaving a halo of darker paper around the pigment. Use oil chalk with oil-based pigments and impasto. You can also use oil chalk to detail or delineate. Turpentine brushed onto oil chalk will eliminate or blend strokes. Continued on next page 1-46