Breaking Pastel Sticks

Red Flowering Maple

9" x 12" pastel on paper

This post is mostly for new pastelists, though old timers and experts please chip in with comments to reinforce the point!

It's hard to deliberately break a pastel stick when you're starting out. There are so many reasons. The brand new pastels cost a lot of money. The set looks beautiful when it's full and you have all the colors available. The tips of the sticks look broad and blunt no matter what brand they are, even narrow rectangular hard pastels look wide compared to the tip of a colored pencil. How can you get detail with those wide tips? It'd be like trying to use a big graffiti scale marker to draw something tiny and intricate, right?

The first pastels I got in picking up the medium again were a 60 color box of vintage Rembrandt. Not one stick broken, all still had their labels, two or three were slightly worn down as if an artist sketched with them. These pastels were hand me downs from an oil painter who tried the medium and hated it, who'd been given that set by a different oil painter who tried the medium and hated it, all the way back to whoever bought the set back in the 1950s or 60s to try the medium and hated it. I felt lucky they all hated it.

I've now found out why those oil painters did, they never broke the sticks to use them on their sides. The painting I posted as today's example is a perfect reason to do it. I could not have done that painting without side strokes. Even working loosely on plain paper, broad side strokes with a half stick become expressive marks. They get painterly results. Pastels aren't usually a tight medium.

Of course for some painters they are - but the experts approach tight realism more the way oil painters do. They block in first to get the general shape and color, maybe the big shadow shapes, then start refining and getting more detailed until at the very end they bring in small details and hard edges.

If you'd ever used colored pencils, you know how fast you'll use up the sky blue pencil in a landscape, or the greens. All the greens. One undersea painting will kill all the blues. A decent sized sunset or a close-up of a red-orange flower will slaughter the reds and oranges too. I went through Prismacolor Premier pencils like I was smoking them back when I did Prismacolor realism. You can never have enough colors. In fact, I did more mixing when I had 120 colors than when I only had 72 in that old favorite brand. Nuances like dusty gray-violet over a red in just that little area of a petal became possible and the waxy pencils are translucent.

So you can imagine how I felt using those Remrandts. For some time I kept them exactly as they were. What helped change my mind was buying a set of Sennelier half sticks to go along with them. These already came out the right shape and size.

There's two reasons I recommend half sticks to anyone starting in pastels. One is that you get twice as many colors for about the same money and the same size of box footprint. The other is that you don't have to face breaking beautiful new pastels until you're ready and know what you're doing with them.

120 Unison half sticks

They look so fine in their boxes. I don't have a photo of a box of pastels with the labels still on because I've gotten used to breaking them to provide usable lengths. I think the toughest time I had was when I lucked and got 200 Winsor & Newton pastels in a wood box when they were discontinued. I'd always wanted a full range big set of pastels, I never had exactly the right color I wanted, it was so frustrating and all the artists I admired on Jackson Square swanked about with 250 or 525 or at least 100 Sennelier pastels in a wood box.

That was when I found out I didn't have a table big enough to spread out all 200 of those brand new sticks. The wonderful big new range went fallow for almost two years because it was unusable. Literally I'd have had to keep it open and keep moving the top tray off every other stroke to get at the cool colors and neutrals but get back to the warm colors. It might have worked with a long table. But it decided me to snap all sticks and get rid of the labels. I'd never be able to replace those pastels anyway. I bought up as many extras as I could, they were going for 50 cents to a dollar a stick on closeout. But when they're gone, they're gone, that's it, and I'll still have a beautiful wood box slowly filling up with Rembrandt and Art Spectrum ones.

I moved halves back and forth till I had all 200 colors in one tray and from then on I was able to use the set. I'd take out just the top tray and be able to find the colors I needed. More to the point, I wasn't limited in my strokes to the width of the tip of the stick. 

It's possible to get decent results just with the tip, especially if you do some finger blending the way I did a lot during my portrait years. It goes faster and looks better to be able to use a piece an inch to an inch and a half long on its side and block in the background looser. You can get distinct broad "flat brush" looking strokes and a lively look that way - and it looks natural to a painting to do that. That's why it's called painterly. You can still tell what it is but you can also see that it's a painting.

Sunset 7" square pastel on paper

You can also move a side stroke back and forth on the same direction as the stick, getting narrower marks that are very expressive. I did a lot of side strokes in this little painting, twisting the sticks and turning them and twirling them. The detailed tip strokes came at the very end. I even used relatively small pastels, the Blue Earth ones are short small squares that don't need breaking or peeling.

As opposed to this type of pastel drawing done mostly or all with the tips:

Two bananas and apple, pastel drawing on paper

This one was almost entirely or completely done with the tips of my pastels. No, I can see I used some side strokes blurring out the shadows. I started with a charcoal pencil, created a tone drawing and worked over it with medium soft pastels mostly using the tips. I didn't finger blend much, just kept the textures as is. It's possible to get good effects using the tips but it takes longer and may result in filling the tooth of the paper faster.

As mentioned, the best way for a new pastelist to get over that panic is to buy half stick sets that are already a convenient size and shape. They usually aren't labeled either. Some hard pastels and a very few soft pastels come in a convenient size right from the start. Terry Ludwigs, Blue Earths and Townsend Terrages come in a convenient size at the beginning.

Terry Ludwig Violets set and Sunset set with one V100 stick

The advantage of the block shape in Terry Ludwigs is that you can get very fine lines with the sharp edges of the block in either tip length or stick length, and very small dots with the eight corners of the stick. This makes them wonderful for sky holes and twigs and catch lights in the eyes of anything, fur textures, a lot of uses for Terry Ludwigs. But they are very, very soft and so are the smaller Blue Earth pastels.

So are the convenient little Mungyo Standard student grade half sticks that I love so much for color studies and sketching. This actually is the best cheap set for putting your toe in the water, it's a bit over $10 at Jerry's Artarama or Amazon and has a large enough range for a beginner.

Mungyo Gallery Standard 64 half stick set

All pastels crumble. They lose little chips. The crumbs collect in the foam padding and sometimes a stick breaks in transit shattering into two usable pieces and a dozen little crumbs. Once in a great while even with the well designed set boxes, whole sticks will be reduced to little crumbs.

I use regular prescriptions so I collect a lot of pill bottles. Save those crumbles in pill bottles, baby food jars or any other container that will let you sort by color. If you don't sort them by color, what you'll get are interesting muted colors, grays and browns created by mixing many different pigments. It's possible to grind up the crumbles from many different pastel brands in a mortar and pestle, then add a drop of distilled water to make a paste.

Mold that paste into a stick shape or a half stick shape and set it in a tinfoil drying rack, let it dry out naturally. You can remold entire broken sticks that way, if the whole stick is gone the dust and crumbles can still be reconstituted. I'm saving them by hue and value, spectrum hue. My handmade leftovers sticks may be a little mixed-up or muted by having blue greens and yellow greens together, but they should come out definably green or red or blue or brown. 

The important thing with that is saving enough dust to make at least one stick and then being sure to grind it up fine enough it doesn't have inclusions of chips that are a distinct color. Terry Ludwig deliberately did some confetti pastels though so even that may be a fun, unique recycled stick. I haven't collected enough crumbs to try this yet, but I've seen a number of online friends create beautiful hand rolled sticks from the leftovers.

So don't throw out the dust that accumulates. The dust from the bottom of your easel, where hopefully you put a foil dust catcher, can also be poured off into a jar and used to make a neutral stick. Each one will be different based on the palettes you used. Even the smallest crumbles still are valuable. Pieces too small to paint with just go into the jars.

But you'll be surprised at how long it takes for a stick to wear down. The reason my pencils vanished as if they were Pringles was that a colored pencil is mostly wood with a little core and half the core material's thrown out in sharpening. Woodless colored pencils wear down much more slowly, as do pastels. Also, the more colors I have, the slower they all wear down.

With only 60 colors, the White and Ivory sticks wore out fast. so did one of the reddish mid-tone browns because I used it in almost all skin tones. That was back in New Orleans when I mostly did portraits of tourists using a 30 color basic assortment and 30 color skin tones set, both Grumbacher. Now that I've got a much larger assortment, I haven't run out of any one color. 

White vanishes fast for the same reason it does in paint - making tints with pure colors. If you have a half dozen near white tints, it becomes easier to choose the right one to shade what you're doing. That's not always matching it. Doing a lavender rose, it might be great to use a near-white pink for its highlights to warm them in the sun, and a blue for the highlights in shadow. Black can wear down for the same reason if you're using it to make shades, though having charcoal handy will reduce the wear on the black stick.

More colors gives a better range of nuances. But here's where we get into table size too. I did have to break my Winsor & Newtons or I could not get 200 of them into one tray.

My best recommendation for beginners is to get the largest half sticks set you can afford, in a good artist grade brand. If it's a casual interest, start with cheap student grade ones but get a big box. If you come out of using colored pencils, go for the big 120 color half stick sets, those are complete enough to be a comfortable palette. If you come out of paint and too many colors are confusing, 60 colors is about right. Make sure your set has all the spectrum colors including violet, it's more useful than you think. If possible make sure it has both warm and cool darks and lights. 

I don't recommend subject specific sets like landscape or portrait because they often leave out colors essential to doing those subjects. Check on them to see if there's violet or purple. You need violet in landscapes, a lot, it wears down fast. You also need it in portrait shadows. Blues appear in highlights, eye colors and clothes as well as backgrounds. Greens show up reflected into skin. As a second set portrait sets will give more earth tones and muted colors, landscape sets more greens and blues and browns, but a basic assortment is best to start with and get the largest one you can.

Of course you might have the budget to jump right in with a full range set in your favorite brand. If you do that... get ready for a slow process of peeling and breaking. You won't regret it. The chore does get easier with time and a lot less shocking. If you hesitate and get scared to wreck them, give yourself a reality check. You're just preparing them for use the way the best painters do!

Why not just take a picture?

Journal page from last August in colored pencils

I ran into a comment in a letter to the editor in The Artist's Magazine that demands an answer. The writer asked "With realistic portraits (snip parenthetical), I wonder, why they didn't just take a damn picture?"

Well, as someone who does realism sometimes, especially in colored pencils, sometimes in pen-watercolor or watercolor pencils, very occasionally in pastels because I treat that as a loose medium, there's a real answer to this question.

The human eye and hand are better than any camera. If you learn realistic drawing either monochrome in graphite or pen or charcoal, or using color in any color medium - but especially those that lend themselves to it such as oils, acrylics, gouache, pastel pencil, colored pencils or watercolor pencils, you will have a truer image with better color and values and accuracy than even the best digital or film camera can achieve. Cameras distort.

We get so used to the idea that photos are accurate that it takes learning to draw to realize just how far off they are. A camera is monocular. Most of us artists have two eyes and can perceive depth much more easily. Every photographer I know grumbles about gamut ranges and their limits. 

Here's an easy example for anyone who has a phone or digital camera. Get one of those standard, velvety dark red roses with a blue-cast red. They are beautiful and classic. As a drawing subject it's wonderful. As a painting subject, starting with Alizarin Crimson or Permanent Alizarin Crimson is a good idea, but don't keep it monochrome, you will want touches of a warmer red and some Ultramarine or at least a triad palette - a warm yellow like Cadmium Yellow would be fine and you can mix the greens with the full triad because those roses also tinge toward red in their leaves.

Now take a photo of it. First with your cheap phone camera. Then with the very best camera you can borrow. If you are a good photographer with good equipment, lighting and studio, you may actually be able to get a photo recognizably a red rose. Congratulations, you're probably professional and might be able to sell that piece to a card company.

But even that photographer is going to take a hundred or more shots to get the good one where you can see that it's a red rose with a water drop on its petals and the right light and shading to see its form. They're still going to do significant playing with the image after getting it in order to achieve something suitable for either a fine art frame or a magazine cover. 

"Why not just take a picture?" is a little bit like "Why not just paint it in oils?" Because someone good at both photography and oil painting will have a lot easier time getting a realistic red rose of that hue with that triad palette on a canvas at any size than with the camera. It's that difficult to get certain colors with a camera, let alone all the color nuances in something that common but that saturated. 

Photographing landscapes, you can get the sky beautiful and the trees are black silhouettes against it. Or see all the detail in the trees but get a washed out white sky with invisible clouds. The colors are going to be off, adjust one and something else will go crazy. Nothing gets worse than trying to take a photo of a painting after it's done, when the painting has gone beyond the camera's gamut range and value range.

Two versions of one of my best realist paintings.

The first photo is truer to the exact colors of the background, though the truth lies somewhere between them. It also shows the value relationships and color relationships on the leaf better. The second photo is closer overall and the bananas are still less saturated than they were in life. No white showed at all in the actual painting. I have light lemon yellows that just vanished. The shadow of the banana on the leaf is not as blue as it looks even in the second version, it's a blue-green, not an ultramarine. 

The second one is what I chose to display, the closest I could come to the splendor of a realist pastel painting that came out perfect. I love color and sometimes I choose to paint highly saturated subjects just to get to use the brightest colors in the box. I worked hard on this one and did the full Colourist Method working loose to tight, value first with a color structure, then more accurate color and more detail at each stage till the final blazed. I still love the painting. I framed it. I might never sell it, this mad thing with bright yellow fruit on blazing green leaf on cerise cloth is something I love. I have it in a black mat as a bright little spot of intense color in my room.

No photo can do justice to the reality of that sparkling painting. Yet I painted it from a photo better than my photo of the resulting art, done by a photographer far better than I am. 

So there are really two answers to this.

1. Realistic drawing and painting is more accurate in form, color, value and proportion. Once mastered it may look like a photo but it's better than a camera can achieve.

2. Taking a picture isn't easy. Photography is a medium in its own right. Photorealists have learned to use their cameras as a sketchbook and master both photography and realism. An ephemeral image, digital or film, is repainted usually much larger than life in archival materials to form a big painting or a mural. 

It's all art. It's all good. To ask why people would draw that well by hand is to assume that art is something like manufacturing. The realist artist, however accurate, and the good photographer both are individual artists with a unique signature to their work. They care about the subject and say something with their images. They express what they mean. 

A good realist portrait artist can turn that grainy selfie your girlfriend sent on the night you two met into a portrait of her and of that night as if you were there when she took it. On archival materials, be that graphite on good archival paper or artist grade colored pencils or oils, your great grandchildren will know about the night you met and the look in her eyes as she wanted you to see her at her best. When she's an old lady her youth will still be alive. An artist knows the story and knows you and puts all that into a painting, a drawing, or a very good portrait photographer you hired to capture that night for you forever.

Art is subjective. Art isn't perfect. Art is sometimes permanent and sometimes fleeting. Digital images may be tremendously lasting if you have some way to record them on durable media or just keep getting meticulous about backing them up indefinitely. Or they may be as fleeting as forgetting to upload them to the cloud, but you remember it and sketch from it. 

Art is communication. 

Loose pastel painting of a conch on dirty sand with foam

Why I painted this conch the way I did was half the photo reference to give me the details and a rough idea of the form, which I adjusted a little, and half the memory of a huge one maybe ten or eleven inches long that my grandparents let me play with as a little kid. I listened to the sea in it and ran my hands over that shiny pink area within. I loved the salt crusted on the outside and its rugged form, its interesting weight, the idea of being by the seaside instead of just visiting a lake. Decades later on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, I walked on seaside beaches and saw the sand and what kinds of wrack were on it. I smelled it. I experienced it. All this always mattered a lot to me, it was the stuff of dreams and my love of the sea. Some part of me will always be a beachcomber however few the times I've been physically capable of it.

This one's more painterly but still more or less representational. Not as detailed as the photo and not as overdetailed as realism can sometimes get - especially if the photo reference isn't good and the artist is still learning.

Here's a much less realist one.

Sunset at Sea, loose pastel clouds, sun, sea, boat

This is almost abstract. I mostly played with cloud shapes to get the feel of backlit sunset clouds in some sunset colors I've seen many times. I worked from a reference that had more or less this color harmony and I moved the clouds around a lot, changed the texture of the waves and gradated them, just did all sorts of things to it to turn it into a fantasy. It reads true but it's nowhere near as detailed as it looks and most of it's from imagination. The boat itself is just a single calligraphic squiggle with the tip of a dark purple stick to give an impression someone's sailing in at sunset or sailing out even farther toward the night. Up to you which way the boat's going, it's not even that specific. Depends which way land is closer, there's nothing in sight for context! 

I changed the placement of almost everything and it's visual fiction of a subject that's different every time. It's my fantasy of sunset at sea and has a lot of my feelings about the sea as much as the conch does. The adventures I wished I could have but were never practical with my physical limits. If I had no disabilities whatsoever, I would have taken off in my twenties to work on ships and travel by temporary work, writing stories and painting journals everywhere I went and probably traveled constantly. The dream of it is still something grand and I traveled enough on land, saw the sea enough to have a good life.

Realism is just one way of creating an image. There's a full range of accuracy and detail from realism and beyond to pure abstraction. There are paintings I still don't comprehend or if I do, I realize I didn't like them because I disagreed with it or didn't like the mood. Many styles of art have stylized features that aren't accurate but get the idea across - like the big expressive eyes in anime drawing, they reach the heart and don't worry about precision recording. Yet botanical drawings and Audubon's paintings are sometimes true records of extinct species. There is a place still for realism as history, especially as we still lose species every year to pollution and industry and global warming.

Without historical photographers I would never know what the past's beauties and horrors looked like in the age of photography. Everything from lost castles to Civil War battlefields do get conveyed powerfully by photography and by realist sketching. But a drawing can go someplace the camera still can't.

James Gurney is my favorite illustrator now, tops. He doesn't stop at what he can snap a picture of, He can put a child riding a triceratops with as much fancy saddlework and colorful pageantry as an Indian elephant in a religious parade. Try finding one of those with meat on its bones, let alone dressed in gold-edged silk and congenial with children, willing to pose! If you can imagine it, you can draw it. Realistic drawing opens up what's inside your head to the rest of the world as if you carried the greatest camera of all time into your dreams. 

I have seen Salvador Dali's dreams and he wouldn't have painted them nearly as well if he didn't know how to paint the waking world accurately.

Abstraction is stronger if the artist does master basic drawing and perspective. Knowing the rules, tricks and techniques of rendering makes stylized rendering more powerful and consistent. 

But there's a natural learning stage where a student's copying a photo in the spirit they draw still lifes and plaster hands instead of live people. It's not moving. It's got a lot of detail, they can take their time and measure and get it true to the source. You can do that with the Old Masters too and it's just as valuable an exercise. In fact either may be a good picture to sell to someone if you did a good job of it - to me that is basic journeyman work, so long as you have the rights to use the source photo.

Either use your own or use photos that the photographer - another artist - has given permission for hand copying to create your own right. Otherwise depart from it so radically that it just gave you an idea, which is fair use. That does mean Don't Trace without Permission, but go ahead and trace as a measuring method if you're learning. It's as good as any to find out people's foreheads are that enormous and their eyes not where you think. 

Copyright matters because the photographer is an artist too and uses a difficult medium. They have to try and try again with different settings and directions and lighting and then manipulate it after it's taken, and get about one or two good ones out of a hundred shots. Each medium has its strengths and limits. 

Why not just paint an oil painting? is as valid a question. The best answer to it is "Because I wanted to do it in this medium instead."

Easy Pastel Demo - Pears

Materials needed:

Charcoal stick or pencil

Pastels (any brand) red, green, orange, blue, white

Charcoal or drawing paper with vellum or laid surface

Kneaded (putty) eraser

A pear, real or fake, to draw from

I created this project for folks who start out with little or no budget. I used Blick square student grade pastels on Strathmore lightweight recycled charcoal sketch paper. Student pastels are non toxic, safe for children, have a lovely soft texture and mix well. Their only problem is they're not lightfast. So if you do a painting in them that you really love, get some artist grade pastels and redo it on archival paper. As this project shows, it's not only possible to repeat the same drawing but it may get better the more often you do it!

Start with the charcoal pencil and draw the pear from life. Set it out on something flat and plain like a sheet of printer paper or white place mat, so the shadow shape is easy to see. Sketch fast and then smudge the drawing with your finger to get smooth tones and gradients. At a hard edge, just don't go over the edge while smudging, go near it and let it stay sharp.

Charcoal sketches to start

My first charcoal sketch is accurate, but I realized the pear looked ugly at that angle and turned it so that it'd look more like a traditional pear shape. Try different angles and move the light if you have to in order to get a good shape and a good design. Make sure the light is clearly from one side - most things look better and are easier to draw with light from one side and above.

Once I got the second sketch, I repeated it two more times on the page and then started using the pastels. I finished my bluesorange one first, but did the red-green one stopping half way to show that stage.

Red-Green Pear

No blending yet on this stage. I used the lighter color over the entire pear and shaded with the darker color, then used the darker color by itself in the shadow and background just like the charcoal. Then used the lighter color again to shade back over the shadow on this one to show how it looks blending with directional strokes instead of fingers. That can look great - think of a Van Gogh painting. 

So now let's carry this farther even if I'm using different colors. You can use any colors you like as long as one's lighter or darker, but complement pairs: red/green, orange/blue and yellow/violet all have a great combination and good neutrals where they blend. Other light-dark combinations like turquoise-dark blue or pink and purple may have brighter transitions. 

Blue-Orange Pear

First, I finger blended the background completely avoiding the stem. Then washed my hand and finger blended the pear, starting in the light color area and working toward the dark. After that, I went back over the whole pear again with the orange since the shadows looked too dark, and touched a little more blue in to rework from that - about 3 orange layers and 2 blue in the shadows on the pear itself. I darkened the shadow nearest the pear. After I went over the blended area, I only blended by going over it with the sticks. Finally, I used white to press hard and make white highlights on the light side of the fruit and went over the blue background with the white stick to lighten it and distinguish it from the shadow.

Finger blending makes a different texture than blending with an added color or the same stick. Stick blending makes a vibrant, almost sparkling texture with a lot of color intensity. Finger blending makes a softer shaded look but goes very easy and mutes color a little. Using both textures together can make a painting more interesting. 

If you do several of these on the same page it can look great! I put this up on my sketch wall because I liked the progression seeing them all together. It won't stay up long, as I do new sketches I take down the old ones and put them away. Always sign and date everything you draw!

"Warhol effect" pears page

If you spray fixative over the charcoal sketch before using the pastels, charcoal will be less likely to mix with your colors. I didn't this time and didn't mind the charcoal darkening the shadows, but depending on your color choices you might want to do that. Try this in many different combinations. Test different shading methods and techniques as you do, along with color combinations and even types of pastels if you have more than one brand available.

I might go back and do another version of this on archival paper with lightfast, artist grade pastels. But this shows you don't need those expensive supplies to start - you can get strong bold results with the cheapest supplies. The biggest differences are permanence, pigment strength and texture. All artist grade brands have different textures, but the one that most matches the smooth softness of student grade pastels is Blue Earth sticks from Dakota Pastels.

Here are some textures possible using student pastels on cheap brown Bee Bogus Recycled Rough paper - an inexpensive, wonderful brown paper very similar to brown paper grocery bags. With student pastels you might as well cut up grocery bags as they're not permanent and it makes a gorgeous middle value toothy surface! 

Chart of some mixing methods in pastels

Try all of these methods to shade the pears in your project. If you use a big sheet you could fill the page with six or 12 different pears, all in different colors and textures. The repeat of similar images with variations can make it a striking poster! Or you could fill several pages of a sketchbook with these studies.

Have fun and enjoy painting in pastels!