There are many mediums, like watercolour, ink, and oil colours, in which art is created. Soft pastel is one of them, and this art comes in dry mediums. Charcoal is used for black-and-white paintings, whereas soft pastels are used for creating coloured paintings. Some artists don’t like the texture of paper, so they prefer the smudging technique because it gives a smooth look to the painting.
Pastel colour art is a form of art in which colour powder is used with pencil colours to give the painting a smooth look without any texture of the paper.
Some basic things to keep in mind
- While creating soft pastel colour paintings, it’s better not to touch your cartridge sheet with oily or sweaty hands because it sometimes leaves fingerprints on the paper that cannot be seen but might appear when you start smudging your pastel colour powder onto the paper.
- Sometimes it’s hard to get crisp edges with the soft pastel colour smudging technique. For creating crisp edges, we can use stencils (paper cut-outs or transparent sheet cut-outs) to create fine edges in the artwork.
- For small, detailed areas, use colour pencils.
- Smudging in large areas can be done with cotton; therefore, avoid using stumps in large areas of the painting. Pencil colours and stumps can be used in small areas.
- Erasers are also used to create small details in the painting by erasing the area where we want to create white values (shine or light areas). For this, hard erasers or battery-operated automatic erasers are used.
There are ways in which soft pastel paintings are done. Some artists use only soft pastel colours, some use soft pastels with pencil colours and some use soft pastel colours for sketching.
Some basic art materials which are required for creating art from soft pastels are cartridge sheets, soft pastel colour powder, pencil colours, hard erasers, and cotton.
