Sennelier (soft) pastels

About a month ago, I had set my sights on eBay to find a box of beautiful Sennelier oil pastels. I read about these before as being co-invented (well, not really invented, maybe developed? Do a search and you'll get the proper details) by Picasso and a nice man named, well, Sennelier (unless I got my facts mixed up).

As my luck would have it, these are hard to find where I live (and I'm too lazy to drive around Toronto checking each and every art supply store) so they can only be imported from France. or, if I didn't mind, from someone in the US. I don't like having to pay duty tax so I checked eBay periodically looking for someone in Canada.

So about a month ago, I found the best price ever! "Only" 60 bucks for a box of 80 half-sticks of soft pastels. These things go for over 200 bucks. I thought it was too good to be true but it really was. Long story short: I got the box and was immediately disheartened. CHALK PASTELS??

I checked the auction and yes, he did state soft pastels. I checked Google and no, soft pastels DO NOT equal oil pastels. Soft pastels are CHALK pastels.

I hate chalk pastels.

But then, I thought why not try these out? I do enjoy trying new mediums. So today was the day I was finally able to find some time to try them out.


Above is a snapshot of part of my box of Sennelier SOFT pastels. The brown one in the middle was extremely velvety to the touch (almost... sensual...). Either I don't know my own strength or these pastels are very delicate that it crumbled as I was drawing. It only happened to that colour. I noticed that some pigments aren't as robust as others (I noticed this in acrylic paints and oil pastels as well).


Above is the scene of the crime. Look how dusty. That's what I hate about chalk pastels. They are extremely dusty and you breathe in everything. I kept my window open. Need I remind you that today is the first day of winter?


This orange one was unfortunate. See the tiny shiny part? That's the dust being compacted from me using it to colour. I was a bit disappointed because that's quite an obstacle. But so far it only happened to that colour. I guess it's the pigment. But with soft pastels (honestly, that's a misleading term), you can always smudge so it's not a complete loss.



Note my garbage can (please excuse it's state of nastiness) for clearing the mounds of dust from my trial artwork. As the Italian cartoonist write, Etciù!


The final product. Before starting this piece, I worked on a drawing of a cartoon cat where I used a brush and water on the soft pastels (chalk is still chalk!). It's not completed yet so I won't post it.