Pastel Set-up

Above is a photo taken from a high viewpoint, standing on a chair (!) to show you how I set up my palette for Pastel painting. The sticks are placed in receptacles on top of a long board which is wedged into the easel's tray, so that I can see at a glance where my colours are. They are roughly from very light on the left, then the yellows, reds, greens, blues and browns to the right. That is then supplemented with four more trays of each warm and cool colours, on the top of a stool on my swivel chair. And in the bottom left of the photo you can just see the four more wooden trays of new sticks that I might need.

I find it the complete opposite to painting in Oils where I generally use only four or five colours for almost all my paintings. With pastels, although they can be smudged on the painting surface to mix the pigments a little, you really need a LOT of colours at your disposal in order to place all the subtle colours and tones that abound in any painting. I don't paint en plein air with Pastels for that very reason - it's just not practical to have so many sticks spread out in front of you on site, which, for me, out-weighs the advantage with the medium of the more direct way of placing dry colour on a painting surface.