I continued with my saturated pastel portraits. Now shifting from cool person and warm background to vice versa. I am thinking of total four color portraits in pastels, thus two more to come at some point.

I used again my old trusted Rembrandt pastels and I also purchased a small wooden case with some new colors. I can then reuse the box for other purposes, once I get my larger empty case where I will transition all my pastels for better safe keeping.

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I also have set of Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils but also a few single Faber-Castell’s Pitt Pastel pencils. The harder square pastel sticks are Conté à Paris hard pastels that I bought last year for live model drawing course (it was a landscape set so there was more vibrant and wider set of different colors than in other sets).

WIP stages:

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I took pictures while painting so I could mirror the image and fix the facial features. I did a quite rough not that detailed sketch so I started adjusting the face as I layered the colors.

This time I painted upright using an easel. So the cardboard box below the image (‘Vahva folio’ thing seen in few images) was attached to collect the pastel dust. I used the box of a tinfoil roll, but I could have also shaped tinfoil for the need.

I used Canson MiTeintes pastel paper, which ofc does not take that many layers, so I got a good start on making a new pastel from all the dust 😉 I used the honeycomb side again to get that nice textured look and I finished the piece with light coat of fixative. The fixative I used is a Finnish brand, CreArte fixative, which is meant for pastels, crayons and charcoal. I did not notice any shift in colors but as I applied it very light, the pastel will still smudge.

Final piece:

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