Pastel Painting was first seen in 15th century Italy, but came to its most popular point in the 18th century in Europe. It was used at this time by artists such as Rosalba Carriera, especially for portraits, where the pastel image was softly blended with the use of stumps.

In the 19th century, many more artists used pastel, including Delacroix. Often, pastel was used to make studies for paintings in oil. The Impressionists also brought pastel to the fore, with Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and others using it not for study purposes, but as finished works of art in themselves. Degas (three images on bottom of link page) was a master of the medium, using it to great advantage in his images of ballet dancers and other contemporary scenes, making images which were at once spontaneous and traditional. He made layers of lines and marks to create a deep, rich image, which although carefully thought out in terms of composition, was also fresh, modern and spontaneous in appearance. He was influenced, like many others, by the new vision of the camera and recently imported Japanese prints, which both had a ‘flat’ type of composition; and photographs often gave a new view of composition, a modern, ’snapshot’ type of image, casually leaving parts of figures cut off at the edges. Many of Degas’ compositions reflect this new vision.
Degas and Mary Cassatt (click on the images for a larger view) were friends; Cassatt also made many images in pastel, many of mothers and children. Her manner was similar to Degas’, and her earlier pastels in particular were composed of bold strokes of color, very loosely done, which gives them a wonderful expressiveness.
Some History of Pastels

Odilon Redon, in the later 19th century, made pastels as well as oil paintings, in the Symbolist manner. His dream-like flowers and scenes carry the pastel medium in an original direction, closer to a more contemporary expression. Georges Rouault, also, at the turn of the 20th century, made unusual, modern images in the medium. (Degas’ and Redon’s images are also at this link, the Hermitage Museum in Russia.) Another modern artist who used pastel in a new way was Picasso. (Click on the Art Images box, then on Picasso in the lower part of the screen.) An even more contemporary use of pastel is seen in the work of Willem de Kooning, an Abstract Expressionist, as a study for his Woman I oil painting. De Kooning’s pastel is an example of the modern (1950’s) gestural image, which is more expressionistic than objective

..</p></li><li><p><a href=”http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Art-of-Pastel-Painting” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>The Art of Pastel Painting</a> – Pastel paintings have now also entered a time of increased interest to … Pastel paintings are very durable, permanent and, as many of the famous …</p></li><li><p><a href=”http://www.squidoo.com/oilpastels” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>Oil Pastels</a> – Under-Drawing or Preliminary Sketching Mediums for Oil Pastel Paintings: What do you use to … Be the first to submit a blurb! Related topics: oil pastel, …</p></li></ul></td></tr></table>

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Links to other Pastel sites

http://hubpages.com/hub/Pastel-Painting

http://pastelpainting.wordpress.com/

http://pastels.webjobdaddy.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/pastelpainting2

http://www.squidoo.com/pasteldrawing

http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/pastelpainting

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Trust Pastel painters will find this helpful

Pastel Equipment

“With Pastel Painting It’s interesting to use pastels in some ways because you can’t blend them, you have to use a big variety of color. But pastels come in hard, medium and soft. You can combine and layer it to get the color you want.”

Painting outdoors – Consider these points

1. Light changes significantly every few minutes.
2. Working on small surfaces reduces the amount of time spent covering the surface and therefore helps in quickly capturing the light and shadows.
3. There isn’t time to waste or agonize over decisions.
4. If the center of interest is a particular light effect, it is important to memorize it, as it will be gone in a moment.
5. ‘Sky holes’ in trees are darker than the sky below them.
6. The tops of trees are affected by ‘sky shine.’
7. Atmospheric perspective makes objects appear lighter, cooler, and less detailed with distance.
8. Objects in fog will still have edges.
9. Trees, like people, are identifiable by silhouette and structural anatomy.
10. Green comes in great variety, and the sky is not always blue.
11. The direction of light needs to be consistent in a painting.
12. Shadows and reflections on water are not the same thing.
13. Dark objects will appear lighter in reflections and light objects will appear darker in reflections.
14. Waves have structure, and their light/colors are different depending on the weather.
15. Relative value is the structure of a painting.
16. Relative color temperature and chroma are secondary to the composition of a picture.

“Photographic references are useful tools, but it is important to know how and when to use them,” she explained. “It is not possible to learn to draw by copying photographs. One becomes an artist and trains the eye and hand by working from life. After mastering the skills of seeing values and colors and creating expressive marks and strokes, the artist knows how to deal with the distortions of photographs and how to create a work of art—a different genre altogether from photography. Premature reliance on photographs is the kiss of death to artistic training. There are no shortcuts.”

Oil painting

This process can easily be mimicked in pastel—which shares so many similarities with oil—by beginning with harder pastel sticks in the initial block-in stage and progressively working towards the softer brands for the final layers. The other means of retaining control in oil paint is to allow each layer to dry before applying additional layers. Pastel artists may employ a similar method by applying layers of fixative to settle and solidify the pastel before applying additional pigment. If you prefer softer pastels and wish to work in layers, the initial pastel application can be rubbed or scraped down—another technique employed by our oil painter friends—to allow for subsequent layering. Depending on the support, this can be an effective means of producing bold painterly pastel paintings that have as much substance and visual weight as an oil painting.

two tips that might prove helpful. First, select harder sticks for the darker regions of the palette, Typically our first strokes are in the darker, dull shadow areas of the painting. Having more of these darker, harder sticks in our palette makes it easier to utilize the softer, brighter, lighter sticks as the painting progresses. The second tip is to take one section of your palette box and segregate a selection of harder pastels, in a variety of hues, values, and intensities.
If you have a heavy hand when pastel painting, work hard to soft

<table bgcolor=”#EEEEEE” style=”border: 1px solid black” border=”0″ cellpadding=”5″><tr><td><ul><li><p><a href=”http://rodricatilley.blogspot.com/2008/09/irresistible-palette.html” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>Irresistible Palette</a> – I love these colors. I use similar strong complimentary colors often to create a painting that has power. I took Night Begins to the Butternut Gallery where it will hang with Goldenrod Field for the next month or so.
…</p></li><li><p><a href=”http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061228184152AAhSHDU” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>How do I mail a large antique oil painting without damaging it …</a> – I’ve shipped my own pastel paintings both framed and unframed in cartons I’ve worked up myself, and had success in sending them.

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