I’ve finally done it… I’ve gotten all my pastels out of their respective boxes, and removed the labels. I don’t have a fancy wooden tray yet, but I did buy from Jerry’s Artarama a 3-drawer wooden storage cabinet. It will hold some but not all of the pastel pieces I have, so I’ll be improvising with cardboard boxes for now.

I’ll post final pictures when I’m done. What I’m finding is that, now that I’m putting the pastels together by hue, it becomes more obvious that one stick should go over with the group of oranges, but another “fits” better with the group of yellows.

I also found that the Great American sticks have a tendency to crumble a bit when removing the wrapper, even though I worked as delicately as I could. And that the wrappers on the Richeson Hand-rolled pastels were, by far, the most difficult to remove as they have an additional layer of tape on the label.

I will trust that the pastelists whose YouTube videos and/or blogs I follow (e.g. Marla Baggetta, Karen Margulis, Alain Picard, Gail Sibley) are correct in saying that you’re better off grouping your sticks by hue and value, with the labels off your pastel sticks (to use the entire stick freely on the paper).

We’ll see. I need all the help I can get!