Speaking of Art Blog

I just finished painting this pastel of a Bird of Paradise flower that I photographed at the San Diego Zoo last spring. What a treasure trove of beauty I saw there! I wanted to keep this painting an intimate size, so I decided to use a new sample I recently received of a brand new surface called Pastel Premier sanded paper, 600 grit. It’s manufactured by Handbook Paper Co. and is sold by several art suppliers including Dakota Art Pastels and Rochester Art Supply. It has been heavily advertised in art magazines, and pastelists are all eyes and ears lately about this new sanded surface. It comes in 600 grit white, 400 grit textured white, and 320 grit textured Italian clay. I’ve always been a sucker for trying out a new pastel/drawing surface, so I thought I’d give this one a go.

Here’s my review:

Bottom line – I’m on the fence about this one, can’t decide whether I want to order some or not.  I have some preferences in my style of pastel painting and in my subject matter. I prefer to paint very tight, photo realistic, detailed paintings with no wet underpainting. I do block in sections of a piece as I work, but I don’t wet down my whole surface with anything before, during, or afterwards. Everything stays dry, dry, dry the whole time I work. I prefer crisp, sharp edges and a finished look on my center of interest, much like that of a photograph. To date, I prefer using Sennelier La Carte and PastelMat paper. La Carte is a blending dream, and PastelMat makes colors really pop. I love them both and keep a steady supply of both on hand all the time.

OK, so when I try out a new surface I’m looking to figure out whether it will help me to achieve those general goals, or whether it will fight me to get the final effect I want. Well, I have to say that much of the time I was fighting with this surface. 

BTW, this paper looks and feels for all the world just like Wallis paper down to its white color and everything! I literally cut my pastel teeth on Wallis paper for over a decade, so I know what to expect from it. Comparisons between these two surfaces abounded within me as I rendered this painting. But sorry to say, looks and feel are pretty much all these two surfaces have in common.

First off, after drawing my contour lines with a gray pastel pencil I noticed that if I barely grazed my palm across any part of the drawing my lines totally disappeared, gone. I had to redraw some lines several times. I suppose if a pastelist likes using a fixative spray on their initial drawing, this wouldn’t happen. But I never use fixative, so this was drawback #1.

Second, I have tried UART 600 grit paper with some success, so I kinda sorta knew what to expect from this grit surface. I actually prefer the 500 grit of UART and have done several paintings on it. What I was really surprised to find when I started adding color to this new surface is that I could NOT blend colors AT ALL with my fingers, I mean not even a tiny bit! You know what happened when I tried to blend? I kept lifting the color back off the surface and had to reapply it! Ugh! The only way I could blend two colors is if I used a hard pastel or a pastel pencil to blend in the transition area between two colors. So that was drawback #2. Because of this drawback I would NOT recommend this surface for a beginner pastelist. This would be way beyond just frustrating for them. It would be impossible.

I also noticed that soft, buttery pastels stuck to the paper much more easily than the harder kind. That was not new news to me. Most sanded surfaces react that way. You have to get past the initial stage of a hard pastel only mildly sticking to the surface at first, and then work your way up to the buttery layer. Can that kind of layering be done on this surface? Yes. Does this surface grab the pastel bits as well as Wallis? No, but that's the nature of a finer grit than Wallis, which is believed to be around 400-500 grit.

What I was really interested in is how it handles crisp edges. I use my pastel pencils heavily for this task. I must say it handled my edge work remarkably well. So, compliment #1 for handling crisp edges.

Something else I noticed pretty quickly once I started using my pastels is that, much like with PastelMat the colors look like they are jumping off the surface. This paper LOVES the super vibrant colored, extra soft Ludwig, Great American, and Schmincke pastels. The more I used those brands the more alive my painting became. So, compliment #2 – vibrant color.

Does this surface drop a lot of pastel dust into the air and down in the trough at the bottom of a board? Not really very much. There was more than I get with PastelMat, which is next to NONE, but less than with Wallis or UART. So, compliment #3.

But the litmus test of a surface for me is how well it holds up and doesn’t fight me when I come to finishing up a painting. And this is where I found this surface fell short in a big way. When I’m looking over every square inch of a finished painting that I’m calling “done”, I check to see where there are tiny bits of paper color showing through that are the wrong color. For us photo realistic artists, tiny white bits equal TACKY, HALF JOB. We painstakingly go back and cover up all those little (wrong color) paper dots, either by blending over them with the colors that are surrounding them, or by using a pastel pencil or a hard pastel that has a sharp edge or point that we can simply touch onto just the right spot to make it disappear behind a dot of the right color. I know, sounds OCD, doesn’t it? But we photo realists get such a thrill when the painting looks pristine, you don’t even know! Trust me, we consider it worth the extra time and effort. It is then that I stand back and finally call a painting “done done”.

OK, so I am looking over my painting when I’m approaching the done stage, and what I’m seeing is little white surface dots EVERYWHERE, even where I had applied a thick layer of a soft, buttery pastel! GRRR! I could already see that it would take me an AGE if I wanted to cover up every single dot. Plus, I couldn’t just go around and smear over even a single dot with my finger because, as I wrote before, that would take the pastel back off the paper and my troubles would be multiplied. At that point I was VERY glad that I was working on only a 6x9” image.

What did I do? I wound up covering over only the worst offenders with either a pastel pencil or a pastel stick. Sometimes I had to really push hard to get them to disappear behind some color too. So frustrating. BIG drawback #3. One way to circumvent this problem would be to START with a wet underpainting. That would eliminate those nasty dots right off the bat. Or, if you’re more loose in your working style and you kind of like having the paper show through serendipitously, well then this paper is the one for you.

To summarize, here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

Can get crisp edges

Colors pop

Not much dust

Cons:

Drawing lines smudge easily

Finger blending is out

Surface dots abound