Pastel Painting Tips

A little help goes a long way

The techniques required to learn pastel painting are ever changing. When you are learning to draw with pastels you have to remember that the process is part of the learning experience. By using different techniques and compounds you can broaden your pastel painting knowledge. Below are some pastel painting tips, tricks, and helpful things to remember that will help you to accentuate the vibrancy of pastels as your paint medium:

1. Pastel paintings begin with light transparent strokes that will shine through and appear as though the image is lighted up from behind. 


2. Please make sure that you check to see that the type of pastels (oil, soft, or hard) that you use matches with the technique that you want to use.

3. You will find that pastels come in a variety of shades, sizes, and types. They can be used according to their size of large or small.

4. Most pastel painters use the harder pastels sticks to lay down the background colors, while the main shades are laid down with the softer pastels.

5. The quality of the pastels will also affect your painting and its looks. You will find that most manufacturers will also make single shades and sticks that you can buy individually if you use a particular color in excess. Or you can also choose to buy the smaller boxes that contain only a particular range of shades that you like.

6. Unlike other painting mediums where you can mix the colors together, pastels come already shaded so it’s just a matter of picking the shade you need.

7. Another advantage with the pastels is the speed in which you can use them. Because they don’t require drying time (unlike other types of painting mediums), pastel paintings can be created quickly and can easily be transferred from room to room or other various locations.

8. If you run out of a color you will also be able to find another color that matches the first perfectly as they are all labeled with numbers to make sure that the batch matches. 
There is a particular process with the making of pastels so you will find that there will be darker and lighter colors that are numbered higher or lower than the original color. As a result, you will be able to find matching shades to work with when doing shading techniques to get the right effects. It’s advisable that you work with a single manufacturer, selecting the best colors that you can use which means you can match colors and get the right colors after you run out of them.

9. The whole point of using pastels is to be as creative as possible with the simplest medium of paints, and you can achieve this easily with pastels.

Keeping these pastel painting tips, tricks and techniques in mind will help you in your adventure of painting with pastels. Remember, there is always more to learn about pastels. You can never know too much.