Do You Paint or Draw with Pastels?
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The Unique Composition of Pastels
Why is working with pastels so often called “painting”? It’s a dry medium, so why isn’t it just drawing? Pastels share properties with other dry media, but they also have unique behavior that’s very different from materials like charcoal, chalk, and graphite, placing them someplace in between; dry, like drawing media, but suave and malleable like paint.
Pastels During the Renaissance
At first, pastels simply added color to charcoal and chalk drawings. Artists started using pastels during the Renaissance, at a time when the importance of drawing versus color, or “disegno e colore”, was hotly debated.
Image(right): Left - Leonardo Da Vinci, “The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right”1510-1513, Right - Jacopo Bassano, Bust-Length Study of a Bearded Man with Cap in Three-Quarter View 16th c.
Left - Chardin, Self-portrait, pastel 1741
Right - Gabriel Durand, Country Concert, pastel 1850
Pastels During the 18th Century
By the 18th century, however, artists like Chardin created sensitive, beautiful pastel paintings almost indistinguishable from oils. The techniques they developed– layering and blending with chamois and stomps– became an essential toolkit for every pastel painter.
What Are Pastels Made of?
Key ingredients allow pastels to move, spread, blend, and layer like a wet paste, making painterly techniques possible. Pastels use the same pigments as paint, with some of the gum binders used in watercolor, but they also contain inert solids that let them easily abrade into very fine powder against toothy supports like paper. When powders are fine enough, they can spread and flow like wet paste, and clump and cluster into a soft, semi-solid layer.
Microscope image of kaolinite showing stacks of flat particles, Credit: U.S. Geological Survey
Kaolin
Kaolin, a type of clay, is a filler that imparts this paint-like flow, but it also has a unique property that makes pastels even more like paint. Kaolin has flat particles that stack and slide against each other like a deck of cards. That sliding and spreading action is what makes pastels seem so smooth when you blend them, and what allows pastel powder to pack into a paint-like layer. Even more paint-like are PanPastels, which come in a cake form that is applied with brushes and soft-tipped tools.
Calcium Mineral Fillers
Not all pastels are made with kaolin; some use calcium mineral fillers which make a firmer stick with less flow behavior than clay. Hard pastels like NuPastels are a great option for artists who want to add color and blending techniques into drawings, while still keeping an emphasis on line work and contours.
Left - Eugène Vidal, Ernestine, pastel, graphite, crayon 1904 Right - Madame Arthur Fontaine by Odilon Redon, 1901, pastel on paper
Versatility of Pastels
Pastels seamlessly transition from bold contour lines to smooth, continuous passages of color, making them an incredibly versatile medium that can be used alone, or in combination with a huge range of other materials, adding unique painterly effects to paper in a way that can’t be achieved with any other medium!
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