Here's some blurb about the medium that floats my artistic boat, pastels.

I almost exclusively use soft pastels for my paintings. Ironically the term 'pastel' has become associated with delicate shades with low, subtle saturation, in reality soft pastels are the most pure, intense pigment available to artists, unlike wet paints in which the pigments by necessity are diluted with oil, water or acrylic emulsion good quality soft pastels are sticks of pure pigment held together with just enough gum arabic to stop them crumbling to dust. Another misconception is that pastels do not last, it's true that they are fragile, they must be framed and mounted behind glass to protect them, but again the nature of the pure pigment means there's no binder that'll discolour, crack or peel with time, as long as they're behind glass a pastel painting will outlast any other medium.

The dry nature of pastels does mean they need the right ground to allow them to 'stick', the surface must have a slight roughness to grip the pigment, usually referred to as it's 'tooth'. Shiny paper for instance is useless, the pigment just won't leave the stick to adhere to the paper. Of the many pastel grounds available I've found that one of the best is made by Claire Fontaine called pastelmat, it's a heavy, stable card with a surface made of finely ground cork particles. I use pastelmat for most of my paintings, oddly enough a surprisingly good ground that I've used for several successful paintings is ordinary old Kraft paper, the lines of rough and smooth in it's surface give a rather nice effect with pastels.

Anyway I usually start a painting with a charcoal sketch, charcoal works seamlessly with pastels so I always use it for undersketching, graphite is no good because of it's shiny nature, pastels won't stick where you've put any graphite (as I've found to my cost)

 Above left is the ground (in this case 30 X 40 cm yellow pastelmat) with a charcoal sketch of the subject that locates basic shapes and colour value, this gives me something to begin applying colour to with soft pastel. Above right is the painting with basic colours roughed in just so I can see where this is going.

 Now I start applying pastel heavily to fill in the colour, highlights and shadows and texture, at this stage I'll blend the pigment into the ground a little using a paper stump, this softens and deepens the colour. Finally the detail and fine texture is filled in using pastel pencils (above right). As you can see the colour of the ground is still showing through and playing a part in the finished look of the painting, this is invariably the case with soft pastel paintings, you can choose to use ground of a colour to complement what's happening in the painting or go with a nuetral shade so all the colour is applied with the pastels.


There you have it, that's how a pastel painting works.