Working with soft pastels (Unison, Jackson's Art and Gallery)

Hi! Today I'm going to review some soft pastels. I bought these soft pastels last week. They came in and I have three different brands and I am going to try them out. The thing with soft pastels is that I've used them in the past. I used to draw with them a lot and I think I had soft pastels and they were really, how to describe it, they were not that soft and buttery. So I always assumed that soft pastels had those hard edges and I saw someone on Instagram using them and I thought to give them another go. So here we are again. By her recommendation I bought the unison colors. They are from the UK and these are landscape half stick. So this is a half stick and this is a whole stick. So as you can see it's about half and I think it's a good one to, if you want to try it out and just see if it's something for you. It still is quite expensive I feel but with a half stick set at least you can try a little bit. I bought a landscape one and I just noticed that it's like blues, browns, greens and yellows and I thought I always really enjoy pink skies so that's not really an option for this one. But I think it's a good set to try. I also bought this fluorescence one by Jackson's art. So I did my very first Jackson's art order last week and yeah I really like them. The packaging was really nice, all very eco-friendly I also bought this one by Jackson's art which is the pale cobalt blue and I bought this one from this one from Gerstaker. I don't know how to pronounce it. I always said Gerstaker but I think it's Gerstaker and this is, I think it's just called gallery. They were on sale and green tea. I think this is a really lovely color. So I have three brands here. I'm going to try all three of them and then see how it goes. I just came back from my art coach and she lives in a very beautiful area and there was this little nature reserve that was really lovely and I parked my car for a little bit and took this photo. I thought it would be nice to try to draw this scene a little bit. What I'm going to be using is my Talens art creation sketchbook. I also have my Tombow pencils, Tombow brush pens here and I'm also going to use some paints because I want to see how the soft pastels do on top of paints and Tombow brush pens. So the first thing that I am going to do is to take a brush pen and I'm going to sketch the main lines in the landscape. I always do this with brush pen, I don't know why. I just like it. So here's the horizon and I'm going to draw in some elements. This is just a visual reminder for me where to put everything. Water. So this is roughly my scene. I'm going to make an exact copy or it's not going to be too realistic. So I want to look at colors first. I think I will start just randomly with one color and see how it goes. First I will use the gallery soft pastel and just fill in. Please know that this is my first time in years to be using soft pastels again. What I do like is to get a little messy so you can easily fade them. The difference between soft pastels and oil pastels is, I will show you later, I will show you some oil pastels but these are more crayon like and really soft and oil pastels is like really buttery. So first impression is that this one is pretty nice. I want to try another color so I'm going to take one of the landscape set that is quite similar color I think. This one is a bit different. It's quite different, more different than I thought. This one is really nice too. Yeah I would say that this is the unison one. It's nicer than the gallery one. It's a bit more buttery. It flows easier over the paper so quite like that. Okay try another one. I think I will go for the, look at my fingers already. Love a bit of smudging. So I will try the pale cobalt blue one and see why to use it. This one is quite different from the other two. That's interesting. I will try a similar one from the unison set. I want to try another one. Much lighter one for the back, more in the background. Oh this one's more gray. Of course, why not smudge a little bit of green into it. All three are quite different. I didn't expect that to be honest. I thought they would be more similar. I think the injection one is actually the softest. That surprises me because the unison one, this one is the most expensive. This one is the cheapest by the way. I secretly ordered some more of these because I thought they would be quite similar. So it's getting messy now. I want to try them. Let's see, where are my Tombows? I want to see how they layer. So I'm going to add some Tombow brush pen here and I will go in over here. And I want to do some paint as well. So I'm going to do that so that it has a little bit of time to dry. I might want to get a bigger brush. This is the one that's really big. Oh who cares, I'm just going to do this. Where's my blue? In the meantime I'm just looking for the colors. There it is. I'm going to do it quite watery and just do a little bit of sky so it has a little bit of time to dry while I work on the greens below. So I will leave that to dry a little bit and what I also want to try is how pencils work on top of the pastels. So we'll do that later. I think I want to add some greens here. Let's see. So I want to see how they do on top. It's not an exactly presentational photo I made this morning but let's see. Oh this is very similar in color. So that's really nice. I think it's nice because here the white comes through and I think it's very nice to have it more filled in so that's quite nice. I'm going to take another green and rub it on top. What I also want to do is want to try the fluorescent one. I always like a little bit of neon color in the sky. I'm just going to put that on top. And now I want to go back in and do some trees. This doesn't look like anything as you can see but that's all right. Just looking for similar colors. I'm just going to pop this out a little bit. Now we'll go in with a more blue color. Let's see how that makes. I still find it hard to talk and do something at the same time. It's like my brain has trouble doing both. What I enjoy about these pastels is that they mix really nicely with, they blend really nicely with other colors. So I also want to try some pencil. So I think I will go for more purple. I do okay on top of the pastels. The thing about pastels is that they are quite big and chunky so you can't really use them for details. They're more about covering surfaces but you have to work really really big and then you can use them more for details. In the mixture of soft pastels with the pencil, Tombow's works quite nicely. I want a darker color here. I really have really dark pencils. Oh this is nice that they layer quite nicely on top. I'm going to take a slightly darker color. I'm going to go in with the, oh that's not in scale but that wasn't the point. I just wanted to test the pastels, see how they do. You still can get really perfectionistic, perfectionistic? I don't know. And I want to make something pretty and I have always a hard time getting rid of that. Let's tap on my screen on my iPad. I have another, I also have a white here. It would be nice for this as this is quite a bit lighter. I have to watch my smudging now. I don't smudge green into the blue. I have a little bit of white here. Oh there you go, wrong finger. It's getting really messy now. So I also have some browns here that I want to add to it. What I really miss in this drawing is some details. So some really clear lines. You can add those with pencil. Like branches. It's a really weird landscape. I'm not quite sure what's going on. I'm just drawing what I think I see. And I think that's really tricky sometimes to just draw what you think. It's more about to draw what you see and not what you think you see. Because your mind is trying to fill in all the things it doesn't see and wants to make sense of it all. And I find it quite hard to let go of that and draw what I see instead of what I think I see. So I think I see a tree over there. I think I see some kind of city over there. But I have to let go of that a bit and just draw what I see. Adding some blue here in the unison set. This one is quite, this one is just a lot harder than the other ones. Interesting that within a set that they are different. And some white here. So I promise to show what more oily pastel will do. So this is the first set that I'm grabbing here. It's my neon set. So there are neon colours. Surprise! And these are oil pastels. So also pastels. But the difference is that one is a soft pastel. So it's really smudgy and soft. And this is really oily. It has a greasy feel to it. So it was really fun to try this and see what I can make of it. So if you have any questions, please drop them amongst the comments. And I hope it clarifies the difference between soft pastels and oil pastels and what you can do with them. As you can see it gets really dirty and smudgy. It's a lot of fun too, I have to say. It's really fun to get your hands dirty. That's it. This is my try for today.