surface texture like a paper towel and
comes in a wide range of colours.
Canson Mi-Tiente is a typical example.
There is definitely a front and a
back with this paper, the back is not
suitable for drawing on, you can tell
by the uniform rows of depressions
that are almost impossible to get
pastel down into, resulting in a mesh
of little blank spots of paper on your
finished work. You can draw on the
back if you really want to, but it’s
not a good idea. The other kind of
pastel paper is the extremely toothy
coated sort which is fairly thick
drawing paper (350gsm or so) as a
base, coated with a mixture of finely
ground pumice, gesso, and colour
pigment (figure 10). I love this stuff,
it seems the perfect surface to me
despite being quite aggressive in the
way it takes the pastel, in fact a lot
like drawing on sandpaper with chalk.
Art Spectrum and Canson both make
good examples of this sort of pastel
paper in a fairly wide range of colours
which is great as you can use the
coloured backgrounds in various ways
when working up a pastel. You can
either buy this kind of paper already
coated or do it yourself by buying the
ground pumice and pigments and
preparing your own paper. This means
you can make your own colours,
any size, and use other bases than
paper (card, panel, canvas, etc).
I’m happy just to have stock of the
large size pre-coated paper in every
colour they make on hand and
concentrate on the actual pastels.
In part 2 we will push some
pastels around but you have to
have some gear to start with. You
can do pastels with a very limited
palette (right down to one stick
each of red, blue, yellow, black,
and white) on white paper or go
the whole hog with hundreds of
pastel and paper colours on hand
to play with and explore. Same
goes for the organisational part,
all the way from dirty little lumps
in a Coles bag to surgically clean,
organisational lunacy (figure 11).
As with everything else in art, it’s
completely up to you in the end
but it’s nice to know the options.Fig 10: Colourfix (coated) pastel paper
comes in lots of colours. Always good
to have lots on hand so you can attack
when the mood strikes and time allows.Fig 11: All put away they don’t take up
room and are right there ready to rock
and roll with the pull of a drawer.Fig 10Fig 11