- Everybody
- 30 min
What you need:
Soft Pastels
What a colour!
Are soft pastels used for drawing or painting? You can do both with soft pastels because the rectangular shape of the pastel sticks allows you to draw lines as well as colour in areas. This blurs the boundary between drawing and painting.
You will notice it immediately on very gentle strokes: Applying soft pastels is a very spontaneous process and the colour applied can be easily blended. This is because the pigments in a soft pastel are only minimally compressed and the soft pastel contains an extremely low percentage of binders. Soft pastels can create such flowing and soft gradients like no other drawing or painting mediums.
Faber-Castell soft pastels are available in two lengths: the standard and the mini format.
The right paper
Not all papers are equal. So what is the right kind of paper for soft pastels? Textured, rough-grained papers that allow pigments to stick well to their surface offer the optimal adhesion. Smooth papers are less suitable for this. When starting out, try not to make things too difficult for yourself and choose special papers available in shops designed for pastels. Such papers offer the best possible surface and give you the freedom to fully concentrate on drawing.
Once you become slightly more familiar with handling pastels, you can also try using watercolour paper, canvas, pasteboard or wood as a substrate. Always make sure that the substrate used is acid-free in order to prevent the unpleasant yellowing of your picture.
A test strip helps you
with colour selection
Would you like to experience a firework of
brilliance? Using soft pastels in combination
with coloured papers lets you experience this
in a blink of an eye! You can create stark
contrast by drawing on dark-coloured papers,
whereas doing so on brightly coloured papers
produces gentle blends of colours.
Colours glow on
dark-coloured papers
It's time to test things out! Combining the
same pastel colour with papers in cool, warm
or neutral tones will result in very different
colour combinations, thereby significantly
influencing the character of a picture. We
recommend having a strip of the coloured
paper beside your drawing for testing
purposes. On this strip of paper, you can
test out whether you will get the colour tone
you want.
Draw fine lines using
the tip - Draw thick lines using
the edge - Colour in areas using
the wide pastel side
Lines and Areas
The soft pastels were not arbitrarily given a
rectangular shape. The edges and flat
surfaces offer you many different ways
to use the pastels. You can use the
tip and edges to draw fine to medium
lines. To draw thick lines or colour in an
area, use the wide side of the pastel for the
best results.
Altering the pressure intensity is another way
you can vary how you use the pastel. By
exerting more or less pressure, you can
increase or decrease the saturation of the
colour applied respectively.
Hatching
Hatch using soft pastels? Hatching is admittedly not the most important drawing technique for soft pastels, but it is an interesting way to add style and can be used in combination with other drawing techniques to create interesting visual elements.
Try using the edge and tip of a pastel to create precise and expressive hatchings. Layering hatchings on each other results in spontaneous colour mixes that will give you inspiration for new visual composition.
Apply colours over
and beside each other
Blending and Mixing
You will immediately fall in love with this:
blending pigments into beautiful gradients
and mixes of colours. When painting with
pastels, you come into direct contact with the
colour because it is typically blended using a
finger. However, you can also use a blending
stump, a rag or other materials to do so.
Always blend colours from a lighter area
towards a darker one.
Blend colours
Mix soft pastels directly on the paper. Apply
colours beside and over each other and
blend the layers with your finger. If the blend
still does not match what you want, you can
further refine it with more colour layers. It is
advisable to use fewer colour shades in the
beginning, because a blend of many colours
can quickly turn into a shade of grey.
Colour Gradients
Creating colour gradients is a forte of soft pastels. They can create gradients with such flowing and painterly quality like no other drawing and painting mediums.
Apply the colours you have selected for the gradient beside each other. Then blend the colours together only at their interfaces, preferably using a blending stump. The paper stump's tip allows you to work on small areas as well. A simple application technique that produces spectacular results!
Good to know: A blending stump is made of paper rolled tightly together and can be cut to size using a cutter or sharp knife. Blending stumps are available in various thicknesses.
Brighten and Darken
You can of course use black to darken a
colour. But try using a complementary colour
to do so. On the colour wheel, this is the
colour opposite the colour you chose. In the
example depicted, blue and orange are
opposite each other. When you layer these
two colours over each other, you get a shade
of grey. You can vary the shade of grey by
adjusting the ratio of the two colours.
Blending a colour with white is a great way of
lightening it. Likewise, you can also try using
other brighter shades of colour. Depending on
the shade of colour, you will get mixes with a
warm or cool character.
The art eraser
The art eraser is something you truly cannot do without! The soft rubber mass can be kneaded into any shape you want and therefore be used for correction on small spots or larger sections. When dabbed on the desired area, the art eraser absorbes loose pigments by binding them to the rubber mass.
The art eraser offers you another way of brightening colours and correcting parts of a picture. And that's not all it can do: use the art eraser to remove pigments from a picture with the help of a paper edge or a stencil. This allows you to create bright lines or areas with precision on your picture for extravagant effects; this also works on dark-coloured papers.
Postive and Negative
Try out new approaches! You
usually draw the subject in colour
on a piece of paper using pastels.
And now you are going to do just
the opposite: fully fill in the background
with colour and leave the
subject in the paper's colour. It is
amazing how different the subject
appears now. Test out different
subjects to see which ones are
suitable for this technique.
Without fixative: Top
colour smudges with
the underlying colour AND With fixative: Top
colour does not
underlying colour
smudge with the underlying colour
Applying fixative
Even if you have rubbed colour pigments well onto the paper, they are only resting loosely on the substrate and are prone to being unintentionally smudged. A fixative allows you to seal and preserve your picture. The fixative is atomised and sprayed onto the picture from a distance of approx. 30 cm. After drying, it permanently protects the surface.
There are differing opinions as to whether you should use a fixative or not. Opponents criticise that using a fixative makes colours appear darker and duller. Proponents use a fixative to protect their picture as well as to allow themselves to further process their picture after the fixative has dried.
Intermediate fixing
The socalled intermediate fixing is a
technique you can use to correct your
pictures as well as work on them in other
creative ways. The dried fixative rests on the
colour like a coat and prevents it from
blending with colours applied subsequently.
For example, you can apply lighter colours on
parts of your picture that have become too
dark or place precise points of light. Layer by
layer, intermediate fixing opens up a large
room for creative picture composition.
Good to know: Hairspray is not very suitable as a fixative because it makes pigments clump together, giving the picture a blotchy look.
Your can apply a fi xative on a preliminary sketch and then draw over it using soft pastels. This prevents the preliminary sketch smudging.
For great effects: Stencils
If you do not want to apply fixative on your
picture for preservation, but there is an area
on it you want to improve, then here is a little
trick you can use. Cut a piece of paper to
make a stencil in the shape of the area to be
worked on. Then place the stencil on your
picture and apply a fixative on the cutout.
When the fixative is dry, you can apply more
colours to the area.
colours to the area.
Blend with a soft brush
Refined
It is hard to believe, but you can use water
and a brush to greatly affect how a pastel
picture looks. Give this watercolour-esque
effect a try!
Draw your subject using soft pastels. Now
take a soft brush damped with a generous
amount of water and move the brush across
the drawing. The pigments on the top
will be absorbed by the brush and
blended over the painting without
messing up the original painting.
Simple but brilliant!
Handy helpers
You have already met the most important
helpers: the art eraser and the blending
stump. But there are still more helpers to
discover.
A knife or a sand paper block allows you to easily scrape pigment off a pastel. Apply the pigment directly on your picture or scrape it onto a separate piece of paper.
You can pick up the pigment using your finger and incorporate it into an existing drawing or blend it immediately on your picture. This is an ideal technique you can use to quickly colour in large areas or create beautiful textures.
As simple as this
Combining strong techniques
The drawing techniques we have presented offer endless possibilities for creating extravagant pastel pictures. If you are looking for even more room for variation and you love mixed media pictures, experiment with exciting combinations of other materials and tools from the Creative Studio range.
You could, for example, use the Pitt Artist Pen with waterproof ink for preliminary sketching. The interplay of soft and with the Goldfaber drawing pencil also delivers great results.
