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!

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!

Packing Art Supplies

Ironclad Rule in Packing Art Supplies: Do not put any pastels set or pastels box in checked baggage. I've been warned by every professional pastelist I know on WetCanvas not to put pastels into checked luggage. Period.

You don't want to spend hundreds of dollars, treasure it and have it with you for the upcoming workshop or your comeback in your favorite city ever, only to open that up and look at a box of unsortable multicolored dust. Shake it once and you have a box of expensive mixed gray dust you can make hand-rolled homemade neutral pastels with.

What that leaves is shipping them on ahead to your hotel or new home by UPS or FedEx with insurance, or taking your main pastel box on the plane as Carry On. I'd planned to do the latter with my Dakota Traveller, the cool plein air box with 275 half sticks assembled out of a lot of different sets. However, I found out from my airline that I'm allowed only one Carry On.

That would be the attractive long haired Siamese cat in the picture. He gets to fly in the cabin, looking up at me from under the seat in front and grumbling because he has to wear his harness and leash. He hates collars, so he gets the leather chat vest and leash. This is so that I can carry him through the airport scanner. If he struggles free while the carrier goes through scan empty, it's a minute of comedy as he slithers around grumbling about being on the leash. Not the hour long high-speed cat chase throughout the airport.

Buy an umbrella and it won't rain. He'll probably relax and accept all the attention he gets for his good looks without a single mew. I'm prepared though.

He's not art supplies but he's my favorite model and my personal Muse. So I'm left with what supplies I can carry on me in my Personal Item - briefcase, laptop bag or woman's purse. I'm using a Just Stow It art bag with a lot of separate small pockets that buckle because my new laptop won't fit in my old laptop bag and does fit in the cool art bag. I'll pack some Gallery Mungyo pastels into it along with a Canson mi-Tientes pad, so that if my UPS boxes get delayed or anything, I'll still have something to sketch my first impressions of the city with.

The biggest packing problem I had was a 200 color Winsor & Newton full range wood box set that I got on clearance. They're discontinued artist grade soft pastels with a medium texture like Rembrandt. I always wanted a big full range wood box set with a lot of colors and many tints per hue. It's that. It's beautiful. I haven't even used it yet, been saving it for a special occasion. I didn't review it on the other blog because it's discontinued, but if you see Winsor & Newton pastels on clearance, grab them. They're a steal at Clearance price and were good value at their normal price.

That's now sitting in the bottom of a big box that's half packed and already too large to move, with my Unison 72 color Starter set on top of it in its Signature aluminum case. More towels. The two drawer wood box with foam padding that I put in all the open stock W&N pastels I got for a dollar a stick in a Clearance grab bag. I really went wild on the W&N clearance sale. I think the padding on the wood box is good enough to let them travel UPS, but I'm seriously thinking of taking some of the big sets out and filling half the box with throw pillows for added protection along with all the bubble wrap I can scrounge.

I saved the cardboard box for my 120 color Derwent Artists colored pencils set. That's going to help keep the finish on the box. It's got to go into another box, keeping colored pencils and pastels separate might be a good idea for both weight and organization. Moving an entire studio, it's good to sort box contents by medium. Bedding, towels and spare clothes make economical padding.

Colored pencils in leather Global Classic elastic band cases might survive being in checked luggage. Those cases are very sturdy, they've survived drops and being banged around in various ways including getting thrown off the bed by a skidding cat. So think about the packaging your supplies are in.

Colored pencil tins are not a good way to pack them for travel, especially Prismacolor. Pencils jump out of their slots and all rattle to the bottom, then rattle the other way if the suitcase is tossed or the box gets tossed. So if you haven't gotten an elastic band case for your fragile artist grade pencils, open the tin and tape across all the pencils, taping them to the tray. Then pad the box around the tray to further cushion it.

Pastel pencils are the most vulnerable. They get internal breakage if you drop one on the desk. So keep those in elastic band cases and ship by UPS.

Paint sets are usually a lot more durable. As long as they're packed well, the tubes probably won't explode and wreck everything. Be sure to remove any bottles of mediums from the set and ship those separately with plenty of padding, along with any spray cans of fixative or thinner. Do not take flammable chemistry on a plane. Linseed oil doesn't count as flammable, that's an artist grade salad oil that won't create explosive fumes if it's opened. Any turpentine or turpentine substitute or damar varnish or any other medium with turpentine in it, goes in the box with the spray cans and the box needs to be marked as flammable and fragile.

My American Airlines booking agent suggested to me that I should put all the pens and loose pencils from my pockets into a zip lock bag, for easy de-pocketing to put in the tray at the scanner. Made sense to me. She didn't think paint brushes and pens would be a problem, but make sure you don't have any razor blades or art knives in your carry on. Those can go in checked luggage. I guess they trust baggage handlers not to search all the suitcases for the odd box of mat cutter blades or pocket knife to commit violence.

If you're moving by UPS/FedEx like I am, make an inventory list of everything in each box of art supplies. Label that box clearly. This will help you estimate how much insurance to buy on the box. It'll also help loads in unpacking, especially if you really need a watercolor set and the watercolor paper box. Then you won't unpack every one of your pastels and colored pencils and oils before you get to it. Keeping one medium per box is good too.

In a moving van, pack those boxes carefully yourself in a way that nothing heavy winds up on top of them and they can't bang around. Buttressing them with sofa cushions, pillows and other bulky soft stuff helps. Do not trust non-artist family members to load-unload art supplies unless you know they're very careful with breakables. If so, tell them it's as fragile as fine china.

I've spent a week packing as much as I can and taken a rough inventory of my studio. I think it'll go in less than a dozen boxes, though I've run out of cardboard boxes and need to get more. I've also got far more empty suitcases than I can carry in two checked bags, so I'll have to decide which ones are the checked bags and which ones will get packed, then stuck in boxes and shipped UPS.

For relocation, I'm prioritizing everything I own on a scale of 1 to 5 as I pack it into boxes. Priority 1 boxes ship immediately, since I have a friend willing to accept them who's driving me the last leg of the trip. Otherwise I'd be sending them to start arriving the day after I do. Priority 5 go into deep storage with my family until I earn enough to move into a larger space in an apartment share. Everything in between gets shipped out as I send for it.

My beloved collection of five large framed artworks are outside of the system. They're on loan to my daughter till I have space to hang them and I'll order a box of six reusable double-constructed framed art shipping crates sent to her as soon as I'm earning. She can enjoy them in her house till I have the wall space to display them.

Another way to bring framed art that I may use for smaller pieces is to remove them from the frames, pack them in foam board and glassine as if I was selling them and pack all the frames into a box. These are the smaller frames with acrylic glazing so I can just pack them in with the unused frames. They're good frames, I got them on Clearance, but if I lose one or two they're more replaceable than the art that's in them. I'll wrap them since I no longer have their original cardboard corner protectors.

Still life objects if fragile get packed with kraft paper or paper towels or newspaper like any cups, vases, other breakables. Stones and shells, more durable ones, got sorted into their own storage boxes a long time ago so those will be tucked in with other stuff.

Pens, pencils, tools and anything small like erasers get put in plastic Sterilite tubs by where I had them stored. That's probably where my mat cutter blades and razor blades should go, since my art knife already wound up in one. I filled one with the contents of the small drawers on the right of my drafting table and have another one I can use for the left side drawers and most of the carousel. The pencil carousel needs to go in its own box, nothing in it, padding stuffed around it that can be clothes.

While I set out to pack my studio first, the need for padding is starting to cut into all the soft squashy things that need to be packed. Extra pillows, blankets, towels, clothes are all great padding material unless it's something that needs to be ironed. I'm a guy living casual. I stopped buying clothes that needed to be ironed a long time ago, but this would apply to anyone. Or just pack laundry around them if it's something you don't want to wear when it's rumpled.

If it can leak or squirt, put it in a zip lock bag so that one accident won't wreck everything else in the box.

It's a monumental task, but some common sense and planning can get my studio to San Francisco intact with a minimum of replacements needed. I wanted to finish that stage of packing last week, but I only got through half of it due to back trouble, mobility limits and chronic fatigue. The up side is that I'll be packing a lot of the rest along the way just to keep it safe.

What goes in my carry on and remains available to me for the rest of the month will mostly be plein air supplies. Small pocket sets of Conte crayons, oil pastels, watercolors and brush pens can fit in my khaki fisherman's vest and my Just Stow It bag. Tonight I'll be weighing that with the laptop and netbook in it, then carefully packing that till I have 20 pounds and no more in it. Together the cat bag and laptop bag have to be under 40lb, so if each of them comes in under 20 pounds I'll be good to go. Wish me luck on the rest of the packing!