I’ve been reading up a bit on the difference between soft and hard pastels. I’ve only used hard pastels but from what I understand most artist graduate from hard to soft pastels, and the longer you take to transition the more difficult it is to grasp how soft pastels function.

Right now I am using Faber-Castell Hard Pastels. I’ve been looking into a few different brands of soft pastels such as Rembrandt, Sennelier and Schmincke. They seem like the Rolls Royce of the pastel world but I want to be sure of the change because soft pastels are quite expensive. I surely don’t want something too excessive or something that ends up being inadequate, due to too few ranges etc.

I’m looking at getting one of the the Sennelier sets, perhaps the “half stick set of 120 assorted colours”… it has a wide range of colours but retails for about $70, pretty cheap compared to the rest of the collection.

So for all of you pastel artist out there, can you help me out? Should I try to transition from hard pastel soon, do you in fact use both hard and soft in conjunction? Perhaps do all of the foundation work in hard pastel leaving only the final layers and detail for soft pastel? And which soft pastels would you recommend? This sistah needs some direction…

I think I have reached a point where I know understand (to a sufficient degree) how to read the values in a photo/source material so that I can replicate it, in my style, using charcoal. The concept of reading values (lights, darks and their intensities) has been quite a learning experience. To a degree it’s not something I paid attention to much before because I tended to make up that part… and making it up seldom has the same effect as knowing how to replicate the real thing…

With that said, I have finally moved onto what I refer to as the “base painting”, the fist layer of pastel. In class I’ve been learning  to apply this first base in “ochre” colors and the results have been gorgeous. My first ochre pastel is shown in the previous post. I’ll post my latest piece soon to show you the growth over the last 2 weeks.

Here’s a little background on exactly what ochre is:

Ochre or Ocher is a term for both a golden -yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as Red ochre. The more rarely used terms Purple ochre and Brown ochre also exist for variant hues. Because of these other hues, the color Ochre is sometimes referred to as Yellow ochre.

Ochres are among the earliest pigments used by mankind, derived from naturally tinted clay containing mineral oxides. Chemically, it is hydrated iron (III) oxide. Modern artists’ pigments continue to use the terms Yellow ochre and Red ochre for specific hues.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochre