Blog Archives
Q: How do you get such fine detail with soft pastel? Do they make pencil-size pastels? (Question from Lucia Sommer via Facebook)
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/img_1519.jpeg?w=826)
A: After 37 years as a pastel artist, I have learned all sorts of techniques and can do whatever I want with it. I used regular Rembrandt white pastels for the sweater in “Sam and Bobo,” above.
There are several brands of pastel pencils that are made especially for drawing fine details. Sam’s face, hair, and hands are mostly pastel pencil. (Now I probably would not use pastel pencils as much. These days I only use them to draw lines and sign my name).
Another technique for making fine lines is to break a pastel stick and work with an edge.
Years ago I used to sharpen my pastels into a point with a small handheld sharpener (I still have one that allows me to change the blades). Sometimes I rub a pastel stick against a sandpaper pad until I get a somewhat sharp point. The problem with both of these methods is they waste so much pastel and pastels are not cheap! For example, my favorite French brand is nearly $20 per stick. I would never think of sharpening those!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 425
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And yet books were faithful companions for Vincent, an important source of sustenance during his times of melancholy: he periodically re-read his favourites, finding new meaning in the text and illustrations each time. Van Gogh read in at least two ways: first “breathlessly,’ and then ‘by careful exploration.’ But we could add a third and a fourth way: thirdly as an artist, and fourthly from the perspective of the writer he perhaps knew himself to be. To Vincent, reading books meant above all to ‘seek in them the artist who made them,’ as he wrote to his sister Willemien. He sought to open an internal dialogue with other writers as artists, and meditated on their words, stopping to consider and reconsider a phrase to make it resonate within him He did this in more than one language – internalizing words, ruminating, bending them to his will, and finally assigning them to a fate of his choosing, over the years. Remarkably several Prefaces by French Naturalist novelists such as Zola, De Goncourts or Maupassant (today considered genuine manifestos) were among the pages that truly challenged and engaged his mind. In them he found the freedom that he was seeking in painting – the ‘confirmation’ of his own ideas, inspiration and encouragement. The work of the illustrators of his favorite books and magazines equally attracted him and had a lingering effect on him, on which he paused to reflect repeatedly, extracting inspiration indirectly.
Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
Comments are welcome!