Baby elephant on Pastelmat, featuring Koh-I-Noor pastels

I had previously reviewed Clairefontaine Pastelmat, the very popular sanded paper among pastel artists. I'd mentioned that I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, mostly because you can't erase markings on it. Well, I thought I would give it another try and this is the latest piece I did on a light grey sheet of Pastelmat:

This is a very small sheet compared to other pieces I've done, at only 15x21 cm. The reason why I used this size was that in my last Overjoyed haul, the wonderful folks at Overjoyed gave me a sample pack of Pastelmat which contained 10 sheets of different colours.

It's a great size for doing studies and testing out the paper, which was exactly what I wanted to do. As usual, I was attempting to try too many things in one painting! Apart from giving Pastelmat another go, I wanted to try drawing grass with graduation from a clear foreground to a blurred background. Phwoaar. Ambitious, I know.

I started out by painting in the grass colours using Panpastels with a sponge.

The next thing I wanted to try was one of two boxes of Koh-I-Noor soft pastels I'd bought from Overjoyed. I got the grey set and brown set of 12 each because they seemed like versatile shades for animals and shadows, and I didn't want to get yet another assorted set of pastels with colours that I seldom reach for.

The reason I wanted to try these sets was because I'd read that these pastels are firmer than the typical handmade pastels, making them more suitable for underpaintings than the very soft pastels I have.

For the elephant, I tried out the grey set.

I shaded in the elephant which took me no time at all. My first impression: these pastels are indeed, firmer than my favourite Unison pastels, but it's not like I have to press very hard. The colours glide on very smoothly and the colour payoff is excellent, which surprised me considering the low price point of these pastels (they're only S$9.90 per set of 12 at Overjoyed). They're not scratchy in the least bit and the best part is that they create very little dust.

And then, I tried to layer pastel pencils on the elephant. Surprisingly, that didn't go on too well. Even though the Koh-I-Noor pastels are not that soft and Pastelmat should technically be able to hold many more layers, I'm realising that pastel pencils just don't layer very well on top of soft pastels because they're harder than most soft pastels. (As a general rule, you have to layer from hard to soft pastels in that order). They tend to slide or scratch off the underlying pastel instead of depositing colour, which was pretty frustrating. 

So in the end, I had to whip out my box of Unison pastels to finish the job. Unison pastels go on beautifully on top of the Koh-I-Noor layer. The only problem is that Unison pastels are fat sticks and I struggle to draw details with them. Hence, some of the lines and hairs on the elephant are thicker than I would like.

Finally, I used pastel pencils to draw in the grass strokes in the foreground. Pastel pencils do draw well on top of Panpastels, at least. I'm pretty happy with the grass - this is possibly the nicest drawing I've done of grass, like ever.

So have I changed my mind about Pastelmat? Well, I like it better this time around, possibly because I'm learning how to work with it. There are just so many variables with pastels that every drawing seems to uncover something new! I'm starting to realise that if I want to use pastel pencils, they're best used alone or only with Panpastels, and soft pastel sticks are best used alone, although mixing different brands is not a problem. 

 

I'm really glad to have the sample pack of Pastelmat though - that will give me more opportunities to play with the paper!