Why the right pastel box makes you a better artist
The Pastelists Conundrum
One of the modern soft pastel artists biggest problems is the huge and diverse range of pastels available on the market, while most painters in other mediums can mix their own colors, pastelists must rely on the manufacturers to set the hardness, grit, value and hue of a pastel and therefore tends to result in ever expanding collections.
These collections (wonderful though they are :p) tend to end up strewn about the place in various presentation boxes both beautiful and plain causing painting to become a memory game that eats up more and more of your time and takes you right out of the flow of the painting.
It goes a little something like this:
Year one - One box - 80 pastels - Fine, no problem...
Year two - Two boxes - 150 pastels - Ok... starting to get a little annoying, where was that mid-tone green again?
Year three - Three and more boxes - 100’s of pastels - This is getting ridiculous! Where was that box of pastels again?!?
The Solution
It is at this point things become impractical and it is here that I found myself at in early 2021. When I would sit down to paint, pastel boxes would take up the entire table and surrounding chairs. I couldn’t even see them all from where I sat because the packing was so inefficient that they wrapped around to my sides. I was getting pretty frustrated so I bit the bullet, committed to paying out some cash and set out to find a pastel box online.
To my disappointment the ones online where primarily drawers or travel boxes - these did not suit me as you cant see all the pastels together with a drawer and I had no intention of travelling with my now epic collection. What I wanted and what I ended up with was a dedicated studio pastel box that had enough capacity to allow me organize them all in one place.
The advantages of one box
Some advantages of the one box over multiple boxes are as follows:
Organization
Ability to organize you pastels in multiple ways, I prefer organizing by value and hue and separating out some of the more neutral pastels.
Ability to see perhaps where there are some hole in you collection or perhaps you are very heavy on one section
Saves Time
Loads of time saved when looking for pastels
More time spent painting
Greater growth as an artist
Better, more informed choices
Greater growth as an artists because of more time spent painting and more time making better choices
Cleaner Pastels
Since it is obvious with the organization where a specific pastel goes and it is near other similar pastels in terms of hue and value they very much tend to stay cleaner.
Safer Pastels
If they are all in one place you tend not to move them as much and this reduces the risk of dropping or otherwise damaging them
My pastel box design available for sale here on my website
Happy Painting
Tel
