Many artists, including Picasso, have painted with pastels. Indeed, Picasso helped create oil-based pastels.Chalk pastels are more common. Both are sold in squared sticks or cylinders. Pastels are versatile since you can draw and paint simultaneously, and they lend themselves to a variety of styles, techniques and supports, and the range of color, shades and gradations means an artist has a virtually unlimited palette. The downside of pastels is that they can be messy and that the paintings can be damaged without proper foresight.
Tools and Supports
One of the wonderful things about pastel painting is that an artist can make do with just the paper or other support, a finger and the pastels themselves. This makes pastel painting a highly portable endeavor, as long you have something to hold the pastels, since they will mark up their container, and something to protect the painting.
Still, there are some tools that can give an artist extra versatility. Stumps or torchons are sticks of paper tightly rolled or compressed, with a pointy end. These can be used for blending, scoring color and other techniques. Other handy blending tools include tissue, cotton balls, cotton swabs, chamois--anything soft, including a finger, that can spread, blot or pick up the powder.
There are uses for erasers that go beyond trying to get rid of mistakes. The kneaded eraser or putty is the best kind for chalk pastel. Some use a plastic eraser for oil pastel. Scalpels or other craft knives can be used to remove color as well, handy since certain techniques require it.
Brushes, both soft and hard, also come in handy for pastel painting. You can use them to blend, certainly, help create texture, and create washes of color.
Fixatives cause the pastel color to stay put, and can be used on a finished painting to try to protect the pastel from being disturbed. The most convenient form of it comes in a spray can. Many artists feel it changes the color, or at the very least take away some of the light reflective qualities of the powder. Others disagree. The use of fixative allows an artist to build up layers of color without disturbing the layers underneath. Sometimes fixative is used to as an almost final step, the artist adding final touches to the surface to bring freshness of color to the top of the painting and this is not fixed.
Supports for pastel painting are numerous. Marks can be made on wood, cloth, sandpaper, paper, canvas--it's best not to limit yourself by sticking to paper alone, since some subjects might be better served by different materials. Some supports show off pastel marks better than others and the kinds of pastels used--hard, soft and oil--also affect the result.
Techniques
Most pastel techniques are easy to pull off by themselves. It's using them properly in the context of a painting that's the trick. To do so, you first have to practice the techniques themselves on various supports. If you know you will be using paper to start off with, at least try the techniques repeatedly on that. Try also varying the pressure of the pastels as you practice. Pressure changes the effects you get.
You can use line to create contours or lay down swaths of color that will be rubbed. Lines are made by drawing them as you would with a crayon. Sharper lines are made by breaking pastel sticks (or using the shards that inevitably break off), by shaving them, which wastes pigment, or by using the edge of the stick. Pastel pencils can also be purchased to make thinner and sharper lines. Keep in mind that sharp edges of color can be obtained with pastels by strict observations of the contours you are creating. Laying down masking tape, applying color and then pulling the tape up will also leave clean lines.
Laying a series of lines close together is called hatching. Hatching can be used for shading or highlighting or for modeling shapes. Drawing another series of lines atop the first, but at a different angle is crosshatching. Layers of color applied by crosshatching can give a rich, deep color effect. By using certain color combinations, you can create the optical illusion that the colors are blended into another color.
Stippling, too, can create this effect. Lay down pastel color in a series of dots. These dots can be all of one color or more than one. Gradations can be achieved by slowly transitioning from one color to another. Stippling allows you to experiment with pointillism, an impressionistic technique.
Scumbling is when you lay a very light layer of color over another. In pastel painting, this is usually done with the side of the pastel in curved passes over the first color. You want to lay the scumbled color down so lightly, you can see the first through it. Think of the effect of seeing something through smoke or fog. A scumbled color can be used for atmospheric effects, shadows, or to bring out colors.
Colors can be laid down in smooth, uninterrupted blocks, covering large areas. A dry wash is when you cover a lot of paper with the pastel alone. If you lay chalk pastel down, then sponge or brush on water, you have a true wash. Depending on how much color you lay down, you can achieve a very intense or very diluted effect. For oil pastel, use a solvent to create the wash. Small sections can be dampened with cotton balls or swabs.
Texture is achieved by hatching and scumbling. With oil pastel, thick pigment can be built up and scratched off to reveal the colors beneath as in Sgraffito. Use of an eraser to pull up color can create a textured effect. Too, it is fair to use the tooth of the paper to achieve texture. After practicing on different papers or surfaces, consider the tooth when planning a painting. Laying a textured surface beneath a paper then rubbing over it also achieves a sense of texture. To really create a 3-D effect, you can actually add texture to the paper before you begin to paint by applying gesso.
Rubbing pastel can mute it, soften it, blend it, create gradations and, when using two colors, create a new color. The pastel can be laid down in crosshatches, dots or in blocks, then rubbed with finger, cotton, chamois or stump. The use of stump to thickly applied pastel, sometimes in layers, can create intense effects. Startlingly realistic results can be achieved with pastels, given its luminosity and purity.
Learning from the Masters
After practicing the various techniques for their own sake, it's time to explore use them in context--that is, in a work. Find pictures of pastel paintings online or from a book. Make sure you can see evidence of various techniques such as hatching or scumbling. Use a copying machine to make a full-color copy, then draw a grid over the picture. Draw the same grid on a piece of paper, which you will use to copy the masterwork with your own pastels. The grid will serve as reference lines and squares. You don't need to even use the exact colors in the effort. You're trying to practice techniques.
There are many artists to study and learn from who among them used pastels in many styles. Rosalba Carriera, Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin all did portraiture. Chardin was an innovator whose work revealed pastel's ability to use hatching to capture modeling. Edouard Manet used stumps to create an intense density of color through rubbing color over lines and hatching used to achieve the drawing. Jean-François Millet was an innovator with hatching, which influenced Edgar Degas, who was bold in his use of pastel, using dampened pastels for flat color and dry pastel for hatching, with blending and rubbing evident as well. Degas captured action in pastel--dancers, bathers, singers, horses.
