First Time Testing Pastel Pencils - Colored pencil drawing

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Colors: Carandache Luminance6901 76, Stabilo Carbothello 60
Paper: Strathmore Bristol 300 9in X 12in
Time took to draw: 5hrs 1/2

Hello everybody welcomes back to blog. Today I'm going to be testing out these pencils the first time. I usually draw with just black charcoal. I've never tried out these pencils before so in this one is a new medium for me and I'm gonna see whether I like them or not. I'm testing out this Stabilo Carbothello pastel pencils, this is a 60 pastel pencil set and this is the largest the sets.

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So once I've got my sketch in, I just start to build up the shadows and basically just block in all of the colors and get a sort of blocked in stage down before I add the details. Let's go through some things that I absolutely loved when working with these pastel pencils. The very first thing is the fact that you can layer light colors over the top of dark colors so this is something I absolutely love to do but obviously, with colored pencils, it doesn't work by adding light colors on top of dark colors, you work where you kind of preserve the light colors and work from sort of light to dark and so this was a completely different way of working but it's something that I really like to do and so that straightaway was a massive positive to me. When I use this medium and another massive positive was the fact that it blends so easily you don't have to struggle and
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The fact that you could block in all of the really dark shadowed areas but you still have the option to go over it with a white pencil and it completely shows up is something that is a massive plus for me and something that I'm really excited to carry on doing in the future. When I use this medium and another positive was the fact that it blends so easily you don't have to struggle and work hard to blend the pastel into each other.

You can lay down a large area really quickly and blend it out to a completely smooth finish in no time at all and so the fact that you get smooth blending and can lay a dark on top light and the light on top of dark. It is just such a nice way to work. The paper that I used was great. It's Strathmore Bristol 300 9in X 12in. It really took the layers. I didn't have lots of fall out of the pastel and it just held on to all of that chalk pastel pencil really well, it wasn't all dusty and just falling off everywhere. It was nice and really good if you're working in layers. I wanted to do the blocking in stage and then I wanted to add a lot of small layers to build up that texture so the fact that this pastel matte paper was able to grip onto all that pastel was really good.

You can use blending stump that they provided in the set to actually blend all of that out and as you can see it's a nice soft finish. I'm going to build on even more layers and it just goes on like a dream and it was really nice. You can just keep blending it out or you don't have to blend it so another thing that I liked is the fact that you can
build up the texture in layers.

This provides a really quick way to create realistic looking skin and hairs whereas. If you were to use the color pencil you can't just do all of the darkest areas and then go and add details with the white pencil on top and get them to show up. With this you can which means that the process was so much faster and you get a much nicer result and so I feel like this way of working is something that I think beginners would find quite simply because you can go over the top with highlights you don't have to try and preserve all of them so if you're a beginner and you're used to painting for example if you use oil paints and you want to make a transition to a drawing medium with pencils then I think this would be a great one for you because it's very similar to working with oil paint where you do blocking in stages and then add the highlights on top and work in layers.

Now I want to talk about a few of the things that I didn't like so much about using these pencils and firstly probably the main thing is that they are really difficult to sharpen and that's just a property of pastel pencils especially some of the softer ones so these pastel pencils were a bit harder so they weren't as bad with the breakage and crumbling as softer pastel pencils would have been but they are still quite difficult to sharpen especially to sharpen them to a really sharp points. They can be sharpened but as soon as I go really sharp it's more likely to break so I tried not to sharpen it too much. I'm sure you can get loads of sharpness out there or different tools to sharpen your pastel pencils so it's not a massive negative.

Another thing that's a little disappointing is the size of the color range only 60 colors and that's the largest set but that's not a big deal because you can mix the colors together.