Pastels: Art Supply Essentials
Hi, I’m Ashley. Welcome to my art studio. Today, we’re going to be talking about pastels, art supplies essentials.
So the first thing we want to do when we’re working with pastels is actually prepare and put on either a smock or an old dirty t-shirt because pastels tend to create a lot of dust.
So charcoals come in a variety of vibrant colors as well as muted colors, like this yellow here. And what is great about this is that you can have a muted color like this yellow and put it down next to a more vibrant color like this red.
So pastels are very soft in texture and when you’re using them, you can also——they’re very easy to blend and you want to start practicing with the pastel because you can make a very light line and you can make a very dark block of color.
You can also take a pastel and use the length of the pastel and make a whole block of color and then as well as using the point of the pastel to make a fine line. And what’s so great about pastels is they’re very easily blendable. And let’s see, we’ll take this red color here and we’re going to put it next to this yellow. Just take a clean finger and blend this two together and it makes a nice gradation from the red or—excuse me, from the red to the yellow. You can also use a cotton ball or a Q-tip and that leaves a lot less mess on your hands.
Pastels you can also mix with water and it turns into more of a watercolor. They’re very compatible with water so you just take a little bit of water and the paint brush. You can blend the colors and it actually looks very, very similar to watercolor. I will show you this in a second, so there you go.
What’s great about pastels is that you can actually erase them and you can use the eraser to actually draw. So if you put down a block of color like we did with the side of the pastel, take your little rubber eraser and you can use the edge at as almost like a pencil and you can draw—there we go. This is what I’m talking about. This is all the dust from the pastel. Now, if you can see here, we’ve erased and made a highlight in the pastel.
What else? So the most important thing about working with pastels is fixing your work because you can make a really beautiful piece of artwork and if a gust of wind comes by, it can blow your work away. Or if you’re taking it somewhere and you accidentally touch it, you’ve just ruined your piece of artwork. So a trick that I like to use is actually aerosol hair spray. So just shake it up and you make a nice—you want to—it’s basically like using it for your hair. You want to stay about 10 to 12 inches away and just spray over the piece and that should fix the pastels so that they can’t be smudge anymore or blown away by wind or your fan or whatever.
So pastels usually come in in a pretty flimsy box, so the best thing to do is to find a nice little wooden box or put it in a tack—like a fishing tackle box which is what I like to use. And that way your pastels can’t be crushed because they are very brittle and they kind of break pretty easily. So get yourself either a tackle box or a nice little wooden box like I have here and your pastels should last you a pretty long time.
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