A Taste of Pastels

I mentioned a while ago that I’ve joined Wanderlust, a mixed media course, this year. The course started out with pastels, which is a completely new medium for me. A long time ago, I’d tried working with one or two oil pastels from my stash since they were not being used much, but I didn’t much get the hang of them, and I completely forget about them afterward.

In the first set of Wanderlust courses, the focus has been on water-soluble pastels, and my stash also includes these. (They’re of a lower quality, and I used to use them occasionally to add color to my polymer clay work. They’ll work just fine for art experiments.) There’s a new lesson every week, and I think I’m getting more comfortable with pastels now. I chose to skip a week, and will see if I can work on the lesson another time.

^{In the above experiments, pastels are used with various mediums like acrylics, gesso, and oil to make them easier to work with, and to fix them in place.}

I’m using an old textbook for these exercises and experiments. I glue a few pages together to make them thicker and sturdier, and it seems to be working out well. I’ve not altered the entire book yet–gluing pages, pressing them, and waiting for them to dry is kinda tedious. I’m just creating one or two altered pages on demand.

I’ve found that I don’t struggle with pastels as much when there’s some medium involved in the process, and this is how I’ll use them in my regular art journaling initially. I’ll wait a while for the lessons to settle down in my mind, though, because right now, I seem to want to use pastels everywhere, and that never works out well. 🙂

^{In these experiments, pastels are used dry (my experiment didn’t work very well even with water), and with acrylics and gel medium to fix them in place.}

And now, I look forward to playing with the next star product on Wanderlust–pencils!