One of the benefits of working at the NEC during a craft show is nipping off during breaks and spending money on new materials. This time I went mad and treated myself to the 20-colour PanPastel Portrait Set, mainly for my life drawing work at college obviously. However, I do need to get used to them, so last night I played with them, setting down dry wash backgrounds in a new art journal that I’m dedicating to work with pastels. A quick spritz with fixative spray and here’s how it went:

I love the vibrancy of the pigment-rich colours, and found that they played nicely together when swiped over with any of the tint colours – until then, there wasn’t that much interplay between the colours, but I may have been a bit stingy with the initial application. I applied the PanPastels using a large Sofft sponge.