What pencils do I use?

I often get asked what pastels I use and which ones are my favourites, so I thought I’d write a quick blog explaining where I started with my pastel choices and why I've decided to carry on with the pastels that I use!

When I started using soft pastels, I didn't have enough money to really invest in a whole set. So what I did was, I thought about the image that I was going to try and draw first and I chose what I thought would be a good range of pastel colours to buy first. I think my first attempt was a fantail so I bought a lot of browns, organges and just a couple of other colours for accents. The first brand that I invested in were Faber Castell pastels, merely because they were what was available at my local art supplier and they are still one of my favourite brands of pastel pencil to use.

I started with a handful of Faber Castell pastel pencils

The leads of Faber-Castell are a bit harder than other brands, such as Carbothello. That's what makes them perfect for putting base colours down and for blending in that nice smooth surface in which you will add the details on top later. 

Alongside my pencils, I also started with some fairly inexpensive soft pastel sticks from the brand, Mungko. They work really well to put a good base layer down and I still use them to do the backgrounds of my pictures. I have also started to build up a collection of the better quality Rembrandt soft pastel sticks. These are much softer than the Mungko and you can press quite lightly and get a beautiful coverage of colour. They're also very good for smoothing and creating that soft texture that you need for some of the soft furry or blurry parts of your portraits.

After I built up quite a stock of Faber Castell pastel pencils I decided to invest in a large tin of Derwent pencils. I think there are 72 in my tin. They are fairly hard pastels so they are great for the bottom layer but I do find that they don't always layer on top of other layers that easily so it’s still good to have my Faber Castells at had. It is great though to have the whole range of colours because unlike painting, in which I was so accustomed to be able to mix any colour from the primary range, the pastels are a bit more tricky to create new colours with! So now I've built up a really good range of colours and tones within my different pastel brands.

I've also recently started to build up a stock of Carbothello pastel pencils as well. These are beautifully soft pastels and they are great for adding top layers on top of my base colours. They have a nice range of colours, especially in the skin tones where I'm experimenting and learning how to create human portraits with more accuracy. They ARE very soft though so you have to be very careful when sharpening. I have lost a good amount of pencil from using a blunt craft knife blade and just kept breaking my pastel lead so be warned, use a nice sharp blade when you are sharpening your Carbothellos! 😅

So if you are thinking about starting with using soft pastels, I'd recommend starting small and you will find your favourites a long the way.  Possibly get a small set of 12 pastel sticks so that you can start learning about how to blend and how to merge colour and perhaps a handful of pencils in a range of colours that you think you might be working in. 

Choose a photo first and buy your pastel pencils separately in the colours that you think you may need. It is quite tricky buying pastels and pastel pencils online because the colour on the computer screen may not necessarily line up directly with the colour in real life so if you can, it is always better to head to your art store and buy them there. My art store isn't in my town so I often buy online but by now I have seen most of the colours that I need to see!

I hope that helps! I will do another blog in a couple of weeks giving some tips on where to start with experimenting with your pastels so go and grab your pastels now and come back in a couple weeks and I'll give you somewhere to start 😅