What are Hard Pastels For?
Hard Pastels make more crisp marks than soft pastels. They are better at making fine lines with as they do not crumble or smudge as easily. However on the other hand they will not blend as easily as soft pastels and you may find it harder to layer colours over one another to quite the same extent as is achievable with soft pastels.
One of the most famous ranges of hard pastel is the Conte Care range – Carre in French means ‘square’ – so they are literally square pastels. Conte Carres are baked with kaolin clay. They are synonymous with drawing classes, as they are a perfect medium with which to create sharp, bold expressive marks, and therefore ideal for students wishing to become more confident with their drawing technique. The sticks measure 2.5” x 0.25”. The edges of the cuboid will create fine lines and the sides of the square will allow you to draw broad strokes of colour. The Conte Carre range is most famous for its selection of earthy red-brown shades, but they also offer a full colour spectrum in some of their other sets. Sets are hugely diverse and range from 4 colour sets to 84 colour sets! The colours are blendable with one another and quite opaque – they work very well on darker sheets of paper.
In addition to the Conte Carres we also offer the Daler Rowney hard pastels, which complement their range of soft pastels in terms of the colours available. They are very similar to the Conte Carre hard pastels, but may be a little more crumbly. There are 23 individual colours in the range as well as 2 sets: The sketching set and a set of greys.
Derwent Artbars are wax based, and as a result have a slight sheen to them. They are not defined as wax crayons because they have a greater pigment concentration, and so the colour glides on less transparently and with a deeper lustre. Artbars are triangular and so have the same sharp edges as a square pastel has to achieve fine lines, as well as 3 sides that can be used for broader strokes. Derwent Artbars layer very well and are also water-soluble; making them even more versatile as stains can be made with them with ease. There are 72 individual colours as well as 4 assorted colour sets of various sizes. Alongside the sticks Derwent also offer 3 useful accessories. The scraper lifts colour from your paper. If you have layered colours up you can reveal the colours you initial drew on, which can be very useful in sgrafitto effects. The spritzer is a regular pump spray bottle that will allow you to gently wet the marks you have made and break them down, allowing you to move and spread the colour into transparent stains and washes. The Shave n’ Save allows you to grate your artbar into particles of colour which can then be shaken up in the vessel with water, effectively making your own liquid watercolour which can be used alongside the Artbars in their dry state.
Because hard pastels require more pressure to be applied in order to deposit colour on to a support than is required when working with soft pastels, less of the paper texture is visible as the colour will be deposited in the dimples of a textured sheet of paper. They can be used with soft pastels, and in fact most drawing and painting media if mixed media is your interest. Hard pastels can be erased or lifted with a putty eraser.