Dive into the luminous world of pastels! Often mistaken for simple chalk, pastels are actually pure pigment held together with just enough binder to form a stick. This minimal binder is the secret to their incredible vibrancy and light-reflecting qualities, offering an immediacy that’s hard to match in other mediums. If you’re looking to create artworks that truly glow with color and energy, understanding the fundamentals of pastel painting is your first step.
Getting to Know Your Pastels
The term ‘pastel’ covers a few different types, but for that signature velvety richness and blendability, we primarily focus on soft pastels. These contain the highest pigment concentration and least binder, making them soft, crumbly, and capable of intense color saturation. They layer beautifully and blend with ease.
Hard pastels contain more binder, making them firmer. They are excellent for initial sketching, underpainting, adding linear details, and creating crisp edges. They don’t cover the paper as quickly or opaquely as soft pastels, nor do they blend quite as readily.
Pastel pencils encase a hard pastel core in wood, offering precision and control, ideal for fine details and preliminary drawing. They work well in conjunction with soft and hard pastels.
While oil pastels share the name, they are quite different. They use a non-drying oil and wax binder, resulting in a distinct greasy feel and different working properties. They don’t blend or layer in the same way as soft/hard pastels and generally aren’t mixed within the same artwork.
Choosing Your Battlefield: Paper and Surfaces
The surface you work on is arguably as crucial as the pastels themselves. Pastel needs texture, known as ‘tooth’, to grab and hold the pigment particles. Without sufficient tooth, the pastel simply slides off or fills the surface too quickly, preventing layering.
- Sanded Papers: These are often considered the gold standard. Papers like Wallis, UArt, Colourfix, or Pastelmat have a fine abrasive grit applied to the surface. This tooth allows for numerous layers of pastel, enabling deep, rich colors and complex blending. They come in various grits (roughness) and colors.
- Velour Paper: This paper has a soft, velvety texture made of fibers. It holds pastel well and gives a unique soft-focus effect but can be less forgiving for sharp details.
- Standard Drawing Papers: Heavyweight drawing papers or charcoal papers with a noticeable texture (like Canson Mi-Teintes, with its ‘smooth’ and ‘rough’ sides) can be used, especially for beginners or sketching. However, their tooth fills up much faster than sanded papers, limiting layering capacity.
- DIY Surfaces: Artists sometimes prime boards or heavy paper with pastel grounds (primers containing grit) to create their own custom surfaces.
The color of your paper will also influence the final artwork, often showing through in areas and unifying the piece. Neutral tones (grays, tans) are popular starting points, but experimenting with colored papers can lead to exciting results, especially when using complementary colors.
Essential Toolkit Additions
Beyond pastels and paper, a few other items will make your painting process smoother:
- Blending Tools: While fingers are the traditional tool (use with caution regarding skin oils and abrasion on sanded papers), others include paper stumps (tortillons), foam applicators, Colour Shapers (silicone-tipped tools), or even simple cotton swabs. Each creates a different blending effect.
- Fixative: A controversial topic! Fixative is a spray designed to ‘fix’ the pastel particles to the surface, reducing smudging. However, it almost always darkens and dulls the colors, sometimes significantly altering the painting’s appearance. Many professional pastelists avoid it entirely or use it very sparingly, often only between initial layers (workable fixative). Final framing under glass is the best protection.
- Easel or Drawing Board: Working upright allows dust to fall away from the surface and provides a better perspective on your work. A sturdy board can be used to tape your paper down.
- Dust Management: Pastel dust is inevitable. Work in a well-ventilated area. A cloth or paper towel placed below your work area can catch falling dust. Never blow the dust, as this sends fine pigment particles airborne; gently tap the back of your board instead.
Important Safety Note: Pastel dust consists of fine pigment particles. While most modern pigments are non-toxic, inhaling any fine dust is not advisable. Work in a well-ventilated space, avoid blowing dust, and consider wearing a dust mask, especially if working extensively or with pigments known to be hazardous (like cadmiums, though these are less common in student-grade sets).
Core Techniques for Building Vibrancy
Creating vibrant pastel paintings relies heavily on how you apply and manipulate the pigment. It’s less about mixing on a palette and more about optical mixing on the paper.
Layering: The Foundation of Richness
Layering is fundamental. Because pastels are relatively opaque, you can layer light colors over darks and vice-versa (though lights over darks tend to work better for final highlights). The key is applying initial layers lightly, allowing the paper’s tooth to show through. This preserves the texture for subsequent layers. If you apply heavy, thick layers right away, you’ll fill the tooth, making it impossible to add more color effectively. Think of it like gently coaxing the color onto the paper, building intensity gradually.
Optical Color Mixing
Since you can’t easily mix pastels into a uniform new color like wet paint, you achieve color transitions and new hues through optical mixing:
- Juxtaposition (Broken Color): Placing small strokes of different colors side-by-side. From a distance, the eye blends these colors, creating a vibrant, lively effect (think Impressionism).
- Layering/Glazing: Applying a light layer of one color over another. For instance, a light scumble of blue over yellow can read as green, but often with more luminosity than a pre-mixed green stick.
- Blending: Gently rubbing adjacent colors together creates smooth transitions. However, over-blending can lead to muddy, dull areas. Use blending selectively for soft edges, reserving other areas for crisp, unblended marks to maintain vibrancy.
The Power of the Underpainting
Starting with an underpainting can significantly enhance depth and vibrancy while conserving your more expensive soft pastels. This initial layer establishes the main shapes and value structure (lights and darks). You can use:
- Hard Pastels: Sketch in your composition and block in dark/light areas using the side of a hard pastel stick.
- Watercolor or Ink Wash: Apply thin washes of color to your paper (if it can handle moisture). This tones the paper and sets up the value map. Let it dry completely before applying pastel.
- Alcohol Wash: Lay down areas of hard pastel and then brush over them with rubbing alcohol. The alcohol dissolves the binder slightly, creating a smooth, paint-like layer that dries quickly and leaves the paper tooth intact.
A particularly effective technique for vibrancy is using a complementary underpainting. For example, applying a wash of orange or red under areas that will predominantly be green can create a subtle vibration and make the final green layers pop.
Mark-Making Magic
How you apply the pastel stick dramatically affects the look and energy of your painting. Experiment with:
- Linear Strokes: Lines for drawing, outlining, and hatching/cross-hatching to build value and texture.
- Side Strokes: Using the side of the pastel stick for broad sweeps of color, ideal for covering large areas quickly and establishing initial layers.
- Scumbling: Applying layers of overlapping, irregular circular or scribbled marks. Great for building texture and optically mixing colors.
- Stippling/Dabbing: Applying small dots or dabs of color. Useful for texture and broken color effects.
Varying your marks adds visual interest and contributes to the overall vibrancy.
Specific Strategies for Maximum Vibrancy
Beyond general techniques, focus on these elements to make your colors sing:
Harnessing Color Relationships
Understanding basic color theory is vital. Use pure, saturated pastels where you want the most impact. Placing complementary colors (opposites on the color wheel, like red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet) next to each other creates visual excitement – each color makes its complement appear more intense.
Value Does the Heavy Lifting
Strong value contrast (the difference between light and dark areas) is arguably more important than color choice for creating impact. A painting with a full range of values, from deep darks to bright highlights, will feel dynamic and three-dimensional, making the colors within those values appear more vibrant. Don’t be afraid of darks!
Playing with Temperature
Colors have perceived temperatures (warm reds, oranges, yellows vs. cool blues, greens, violets). Placing warm colors adjacent to cool colors creates another level of contrast that enhances vibrancy. A cool blue shadow next to a sunlit warm yellow wall will make both colors feel more intense.
Preserve Your Lights
Highlights give your painting sparkle and dimension. Try to preserve the white or light color of your paper for the brightest highlights, or apply your lightest pastel values last, with a light touch. Overworking highlights or blending them too much can quickly dull them.
Verified Fact: The vibrancy of pastels is directly related to the high concentration of pure pigment and the minimal amount of binder used. This allows light to interact more directly with the pigment particles compared to oil or acrylic paints, where pigments are fully encased in a binder medium. Choosing quality pastels with high pigment loads enhances this effect.
Workflow and Best Practices
Develop a consistent workflow. Start with a light sketch (using hard pastel or charcoal) to place your main elements. Block in the large shapes and establish your darks and mid-tones, often working from dark to light or covering the whole surface with mid-tones first. Gradually refine shapes and add lighter values and details. Remember to step back often to view your painting from a distance – this helps you assess the overall composition, values, and color balance. Keep your hands clean by wiping them frequently on a damp cloth to prevent unintentionally muddying light areas.
Finishing Touches: Framing Matters
As mentioned, final fixative is optional and often detrimental to vibrancy. The essential step for protecting a finished pastel painting is proper framing. It MUST be framed under glass (or acrylic glazing) to protect it from smudging and dust. Crucially, the surface of the pastel must NOT touch the glass. This is achieved by using a mat board or spacers within the frame to create an air gap.
Embrace the Dust and Color
Pastel painting is a wonderfully direct and rewarding medium. Its ability to produce luminous, vibrant color is unparalleled. Don’t be intimidated by the dust or the techniques. Embrace experimentation, play with layering and mark-making, and pay attention to value and color relationships. With practice, you’ll unlock the secrets to creating truly radiant artworks that capture the unique beauty of pastel. Get your hands colorful and start painting!
