Back in 2000, when I was about to release Sheer Heaven to the art marketplace, one of the things that excited me most was that it was a truly *new* art material. It is rare and wonderful when something is so new and different that it actually changes how you create.  Sheer Heaven was like that - and so are Pan Pastels.

I have always loved fine art pastels for their wonderful texture and color blends, but I have never used them much because, well, to be honest, I always made such a big mess. By the time I had applied sufficient color, I had also produced monumental piles of pastel dust. What I did not manage to inhale got all over everything within blocks of the studio.

 

When “craft chalks” came along, I tried again. I didn’t make nearly as big a mess with them, but neither did I get any satisfying richness of color. They just did not have enough pigment in them, and many of the less expensive brands had grit or chunks in them that you didn’t see until they made dark lines when you rubbed the color onto paper.

 

Then Ann Pizinger, an online friend, told me about this new kind of pastel - Pan Pastels - and by the time she had finished telling, I had already run out and bought a couple colors (Who’s an impulsive art supply buyer? Not me!).

 

Since then, many of you have heard me raving around the internet about how wonderful these are - and they truly are.

 

Each color comes in its own “pan” and the pans screw together for easy transport. This keeps each color fresh - unlike when pastel chalks travel around together in a box and coat themselves in each other’s color.

 

The Pan Pastel colors are so rich, you feel you are working with pure pigment. They go on paper like a dream - actually “creamy” even though there is no moisture involved. I use make-up cotton pads, paper towels, and mostly, the special Sofft Tools made by the same company to apply the color and it is just like applying paint. Blending of colors is too easy to believe.

 

The Sofft tools seem at first to be similar to make-up sponge type foam, but if you experiment with both, you will find a world of difference. The Sofft Tools glide over the paper while a make-up sponge tends to drag.

 

The range of colors can be confusing at first - until you realize that there are 20 base colors, 20 tints of them, and 20 shades of them. If you can only afford a few at first, try your favorite colors and their shades, and get White. You can easily blend tints by adding white, but trying to blend shades by adding black or gray is not an easy thing at all.

 

As this magazine goes along, you will find me posting many tips and techniques using Pan Pastels because for one thing, I love them, and for another, they are selling like crazy and there’s not much instruction out there yet.

 

For this time, I’ll share my own first experiments so you can get an idea how they work. These were done in my art journal which is a Moleskine Sketchbook.

I only bought Ultramarine Blue, Chrome Green, and White my first time out, so this page was done with them. One of my favorite things is that Pan Pastels erase. A firm white vinyl eraser seems to work best. Watercolor pencils works wonderfully with the pastels.

Here’s another experiment page. The watercolor pencil part is only in the sun area. The rest is Pan Pastel.

 

I have some Post-It Correction Tape that is 6-lines wide (1 inch). (See our Links page for an online source.)

It makes great masking material, so I punched stars out of it with a decorative punch. You could use just the sticky part of a regular Post-It note.

 

I put the stars in the bottom right square and rubbed the pastel color over them. When I picked them up, I had lovely white stars in my “sky”.

 

I then stuck the lifted stars onto that middle right square and that looked good too.

 

For the life of me, I can’t remember what I did in the bottom left square, but it doesn’t matter because I didn’t like the way it looked anyway.

 

You can see a video (short) about Pan Pastels at this link: