Using Pan Pastels - You'll Love them!

Hello Friends!

Wishing you a wonderful holiday and may I just say "God Bless America all His children bravely standing to up to fight for our Country".  I am more grateful today for our freedom than I ever was before.

And on with the show... :)

I recently purchased a few colors (4) of "Pan-Pastel Artists' Pastels" to play with.  They cost about the same as a Copic and come with two different kinds of applicators with each color. I chose colors that would make sunset and sky backgrounds because they seemed to make such beautiful brayer-looking backgrounds.

I watched several You-Tube videos (this is a really good one by the manufacturer, but there are tons of others), I actually emailed the inventors of the product to ask questions that I couldn't find answers to (they were very responsive BTW!), and I searched on-line for pros and cons about using them.  Everything I read about the product, and I mean EVERYTHING, was thumbs-up by both professional artists and casual card makers/scrapbookers alike.

Because I'm short on time today, I won't go into too much detail about my card (I will post more cards that I've already made later), but I did want to share this very quick and easy card I made. I used Magenta, Permanent Red, "Diarylikde" Yellow Tint, and Orange.  All it took was a few swipes of each color using a soft round sponge (similar to the kind you get in a pressed makeup compact), a little blending, and a quick light spray of hairspray to afix the colors.  Insanely EASY to achieve the background, not to mention quick!

The pastels are "almost" creamy, like mineral makeup foundation, they blend beautifully so you can create tons of different colors, they will erase with a white eraser so they are very forgiving, and you can layer color upon color to get as rich and vibrant a color as you need.  They are awesome!!  They don't "dry" on your paper (like ink) so you can continue to blend, change or add colors as long as you like until you get the background you're going for.  When you're done, spray it lightly with a fixative and the colors are now in place and touchable.

After spraying your background with a fixative (hairspray will do), you can stamp right over it like I did here.  You can use any techniques with these pastels that you can do with any other chalks or pastels (will post some samples soon).





Check out You-Tube (search Pan-Pastels) and you'll find several videos on using them. If you try Google you'll also get lots of information.  Or, you are welcome to leave me questions and I'll share what ever I've learned and try to answer!! 

Thanks so much for stopping by!