Pastels

Julie teaches pastel painting on 600 grit sand paper. If your goal is to buy prints and not sell the originals, sandpaper works great. The first little bird in the pics above is from my class with Julie and was done on sandpaper. I have tried a couple other types of supports. My favorite so far is Ampersand pastelbord. It is like an archival sandpaper mounted to a little panel so it is will hopefully be much easier to display than pastel paper.

To get started in pastels I purchased all different colors of pan pastels. They are a little pricey so try to purchase them in sets rather then individual colors. I also purchased sticks and pencils. I have yet to use the sticks but love using the pencils on top of the soft pastels to add a little detail on the top layer.

In my experience, the painting comes out much better if you use a light touch and don't overwork it. The colors blend much better if there is less chalk on the paper. This also means that the paintings typically take no time at all. Most of the paintings above I did in one or two nights! 

And here we get to the downside of pastels. You can whip out the paintings really fast, but then comes the dilemma of how to display them. They are chalk after all, and are easily disturbed. (I may eventually try oil pastels, which don't have this issue.) Anyway, I initially order some frames with glass to see how they looked. I felt like the glass really took away from the dreamy look of the pastels. But if you want to go that route, the best place I found to order frames is arttoframe.com. You can choose your frame, your mat, your backing and your glass. As I understand, archival materials are recommended, as well as museum glass to avoid reflection and static interaction with the pastels. It is also recommended to keep the pastel from touching the glass. I found the following company which sells nifty little spacers you can attach to the mat to create a separation between the painting and the glass:

https://www.framedestination.com/ctg/framing-supplies/picture-frame-spacers.html

I have spent so much money already on trying to find a good floating frame for pastelbord. Even the shallow floating frames are not shallow enough as the pastelbord is pretty thin. I finally found the following company that sells floating frames for panels. I have ordered some - we'll see how they look!

https://www.webpictureframes.com/floating-frames.html

In the meantime, I plan on making my own flat wood frames out of lumber, and staining them with a wood stain. The panels won't sit down into the frame, but the panels are thin and I plan on painting the sides with a metallic high flow liquid acrylic paint (very carefully so as not to disturb the pastel of the fixative).

If you don't display behind glass then you need to fix the pastels in place. This has caused me much angst I will say, and I have ruined at least two paintings as I did not apply the fixative uniformly, or I applied too much at one time and it made the pastels run (or I got dog hair in the fixative as it was drying and tried to pick it out - lol). But I can always order prints (make sure to take a picture of your artwork before you fix!!) After much research, the fixative I am currently using is called Final Fix from Spectrafix. It is made from casein and beeswax. The first layer needs to be VERY light so as to not run the pastels, and in my experience, the later layers need to be pretty light as well. At least three layers are needed. I find that it darkens the painting a bit, unfortunately, but if you apply evenly and in light layers in does a good job at sealing the pastels.