Pastel Painting Tutorials

Painting with pastels can be a lot of fun and very rewarding if you know the right way to go about it. Believe it or not, you can create beautiful paintings.

So what are pastels?

Pastels are sticks of coloured pigment – the same pigment that is used in paint.

Pastels are applied to a surface (such as art paper) that has a somewhat rough or abrasive texture called ‘tooth,’ and is therefore capable of taking and holding the pigment.

The most commonly used pastels are soft pastels. As the name implies these are soft, with a crumbly consistency, and using them is actually more like painting than drawing.

Harder pastels are available, but they are usually used only for sketching and detail work.

The benefits of using pastels as your artistic medium are many. First of all, you don’t require a lot of other equipment. All you need is the pastels themselves, some paper, and a drawing board.

Secondly pastels are simple to use. You don’t need to prepare the surface of the paper before you start working, and you don’t need chemicals to clean yourself or your work area when you finish.

Thirdly, pastels are permanent. Pastel sticks last forever and pastel paintings won’t fade over time like paint can.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, pastels combine the free expression and immediacy of drawing with the rich colour and depth of painting.

Whether you are a novice artist or you have experience working with another medium, there is a lot to like about pastels.

Yes, they can be messy (old clothes and a dustsheet are a must) but that’s all part of the fun. In any case, we will cover more of this as we go on.

This course will give you an introduction and an overview into working with pastels and we really do hope that you will decide to try them – or perhaps to pick them up again.

Above all though, pastels offer a freedom that is difficult to capture with other mediums.

In any case, if you are looking to develop your skills as an artist, we recommend picking up a copy of ‘Pastel Painting Secrets.’ It’s the best book on the market (that we know of), it goes into much more detail than we have been able to put into this series and it has lots of coloured illustrations, so you can actually ‘see’ the results being achieved.

You can create awesome paintings and you can learn how to do it right here.

The ‘Pastel Painting Secrets’ book is the most up-to-date guide available on the internet covering all aspects of pastel art.

This book is about:

• How pastels are made
• What the right tools are
• Correcting mistakes
• The different types of pastels
• Techniques
• Lots of helpful photographs

And a whole heap more.

By the way, there are a couple of other books just in case you want to dive straight in.

‘Step by Step with a Pastel Portrait’ and

‘Step by Step with a Pastel Scene.’

Both have well over 100 photos, that clearly demonstrate what the artist is doing and both are very easy to read.

And there are some free bonus books as well.

You can find out more about these books here.