Get the best pastels – by making your own!
As most artists and crafts people, pet portrait artists are a canny lot and, if they can save a bit of money by making their own materials, they certainly will. As with paints, pastels can be very expensive to buy and the best ones always seem to run out more quickly however, it is possible to make your own at a fraction of the price of shop bought ones. It is also possible to achieve better results, often manufactured pastels lack the intermediate greys, grey-greens and the half-tone required for rendering flesh colours.
Pastel sticks are soft, medium or hard according to the amount of binder incorporated into the paste. Harder pastels use more binder but sacrifice colour intensity, softer pastels are brittle but achieve greater colour brilliance.
The process
1. Start with one pigment this will need to be lightened with an equal amount of zinc white or finely powdered whiting to get the desired colour. It is best to start with the darkest shade select some of the mixture for the pastel and reserve the rest to make the lighter shades.
2. Getting to know how much binder to use only really comes through trial an error. There are several possible types of binder, a mix of gum arabic and water (commonly in a ratio of 1:20, however weaker solutions may be required for some colours) or leaf gelatine (melted into distilled water) can be used (again experiment to find out what the minimum is required to do the job). A gum arabic binder tend to produce harder pastels that form a crust on the outside, so that pastels need to be ’started’ by rubbing with sandpaper. Gelatine produces a pastel with a nice crumbly texture, but it can be difficult to form a shape.
3. Place the pigment for the pastel on a slab of ground glass and pour sufficient binder solution to work it into a thick paste. Use a palette knife to mix the materials together, the final mixture should be moist but not sticky.
4. Take off sufficient mixture to make one pastel, form it into a rough sausage using the palette knife and place it on a strip of blotting paper. To create the crayon shape, roll the mixture by alternately lifting either side of the blotting paper, it is best to avoid making it too long or thin.
5. Once the first set of pastels are complete, you can use the reserved pigment mixture to make up the next colour shade. Add sufficient whiting to achieve the tint required, separate some of the mixture for the pastels and reserve the rest for the next tint in the range and so forth, until you have all the shades you need from that particular colour.
6. For darker shades the same process is used with black instead of the whiting and greens can be made brighter with yellows.
You’re now in command – give it a go! By making your own you can hone the pastels so that they are best suited to your painting style with the colours that you want!
