Making Pastels
With most artists and crafts people, pet portrait artists are a thrifty bunch and, if it is possible to save a bit of money by making their own materials, they will certainly do so. As with paints, pastels can be very expensive to buy and the best ones always seem to run out more quickly however, it is possible to make your own at a fraction of the price of shop bought ones. It is also possible to achieve better results, often manufactured pastels lack the intermediate greys, grey-greens and the half-tone required for rendering flesh colours.
Pastel sticks are soft, medium or hard according to the amount of binder incorporated into the paste. More binder in the pastel mixture will produce a harder crayon, though with less colour saturation, soft colours have more colour brilliance but can be fragile.
Method
1. Start with one pigment this will need to be lightened with an equal amount of zinc white or finely powdered whiting to get the desired colour. It is best to start with the darkest shade select some of the mixture for the pastel and reserve the rest to make the lighter shades.
2. Judging the amount of binder needed to do the job will require time and trial and error. There are several possible types of binder, a mix of gum arabic and water (commonly in a ratio of 1:20, however weaker solutions may be required for some colours) or leaf gelatine (melted into distilled water) can be used (again experiment to find out what the minimum is required to do the job). A gum arabic binder tend to produce harder pastels that form a crust on the outside, so that pastels need to be ’started’ by rubbing with sandpaper. Gelatine produces a light crumbly pastel, this though can be more difficult to make into a crayon.
3. Place the pigment for the pastel on a slab of ground glass and pour sufficient binder solution to work it into a thick paste. Use a palette knife to mix the materials together, the final mixture should be moist but not sticky.
4. Take off sufficient mixture to make one pastel, form it into a rough sausage using the palette knife and place it on a strip of blotting paper. Form the crayon by rolling it in the paper, however, try not to make it too long or thin.
5. Once the first set of pastels are complete, you can use the reserved pigment mixture to make up the next colour shade. Add sufficient whiting to achieve the tint required, separate some of the mixture for the pastels and reserve the rest for the next tint in the range and so forth, until you have all the shades you need from that particular colour.
6. For darker shades the same process is used with black instead of the whiting and greens can be made brighter with yellows.
You’re now in control of your colours – so experiment! You can achieve brighter purer colours, and just the shades you need, by making your own!
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