After many month of watercolor painting, I thought I had to do something different. Changing the medium gives you a fresh momentum and gets you out of your routine. You have to learn a lot about the new technique. It starts by selecting the right paper and also important the color of the paper for creating harmony or contrast. The paintings shown above are done on Canson tinted paper. The pastels I used are Pan pastel, Jaxon Soft pastels and Van Gogh semi soft pastels for making lines and smaller marks. The advantage of this technique, you do not need any brushes and take care of drying time for color and brushes. You can stop painting any time and resume as often as you like. The only thing you have to do is wash your hands. The disadvantage of this technique to my opinion is the dust you produce by applying the color to the paper. You have to protect the ground, since a lot of pigment follows gravity and collects on the ground. Since the dust is very fine there is also a danger to breath it in. Pastel painters sometimes use a mask for protection and gloves for blending. But the colors are very bright and the method is like drawing. If something is not as you like, you can easily change things later.
