Pastels

Chalk pastels are hands down my favourite medium to work with.   My first experience them was less than stellar because I'd bought a cheap set and they seemed to scratch the paper as much as lay any colour down.  I was also taken aback by the mess.  Now that I'm a seasoned arteest *g*, I keep a dishtowel on my lap for frequent finger wiping, and a damp sponge nearby for when I really need to clean my hands off.

Blending is a large part of the way I draw, and that's probably why I love pastels so much.  They are also VERY forgiving.  Don't like the way something turned out?  Wipe it off and draw it again!

It is also very exciting to draw highlights ON TOP of darks.  As someone who only drew with pencils for a few years, this is a novelty that will never wear off.

Working with pastels is a very different process for me.  Probably because you first work in blocks of colour, blending in the tones, filling in the spaces etc, and THEN when you are almost done, you add the details.  If you look at my last post on pencil art, it works almost the exact opposite way.

I not super fussy about brand with the sticks.  I have some prisma colour, I have some  .. uh .. other stuff, and as long as they are from an art store, instead of like ... an office supply store, they seem to work well.  I generally purchase them individually, instead of in sets, because I don't always want the shades that they stick you with in them.

Speaking of sticks ... it was over a year of trying to make tiny little details with big chunks of pastel when I finally discovered that there are PASTEL PENCILS!  OMG!  What the hell?  Was I living under a rock?  Why did nobody tell me about these??

Talk about allowing lots of tiny details.
And colour.  Let's talk about colour!  I am a total newbie to the world of colour.  When I first fell in love with Megamind and joined the fandom, I felt like I didn't have anything of quality to contribute, because I sucked at drawing digitally, and uh ... the characters were CREATED digitally.

Then, on a whim, I tried chalk pastels on black paper and BLAM!  I fell in love all over again.  I must have churned out twenty pictures in that first week, I was so excited to discover a medium that worked as well as digital to give the characters life, dimension and rich, eye popping colours.

Add that to the recenty discovery of the pastel pencils, and I was an instant fan.  BTW, the brand I prefer in the pencils is the Pitt Pastel by Faber Castell.  Don't use Conte!  As a brand, Conte are fine, but they are made from a different substance (oil base) and you cannot mix them with the chalk.

Chalk is also a great medium for drawing tentacles. ;)  Using different types of paper can also yield interesting results.  I did this one on brown craft paper.  Sadly, I thought I'd brought my pencil crayons with me, not my pastels, and it took a good five minutes for me to figure out why my pencils outlines were smudging so much. durrr

TL;DR  Pastels are fun!

Good night!