Working with Pastels and Charcoal

I’ve been taking Rebecca de Mondenca’s pastel classes on arttutor.com, and this is some of my initial work from her class “A Beginner’s Guide to Pastels”.

I find I don’t care for the pastel paper that has the honeycomb look, although it can hold more pastel layering, given the “tooth” of the paper.

Most of these are from using the Dick Blick Artist’s Pastels (60 set), but the (finger) blended blues are Sennelier Landscape (30 set) pastels.

Mark Making in Charcoal

Now that I’ve completed “Drawing Essentials”, I am browsing through ArtTutor for more classes, and am interested in trying out charcoal. (I have memories of using charcoal pencils in grade-school art.) In any case, in this image, I tested out charcoal pencils (upper left), Comte pencils (upper right), vine charcoal (lower left) and compressed charcoal (lower right). The white –except for the Comte pencil example — is my General’s white “charcoal” pencil. The paper used is gray-toned Strathmore.