If you are just starting out, Canson Mi-tientes is a good place to start. It is heavy paper with some cotton content, comes in colors (I recommend a middle gray like Steel or Felt gray, Moonstone is also nice), and has either a textured or smooth side. The downside is it doesn’t hold a lot of layers, but it feels like paper we are used to. To draw with soft pastel, to avoid dust from collecting on the surface, mount it and then prop it up at an easel with a dust cover beneath. When using soft pastel, especially on sanded or velour paper, make sure to rub or press excess pastel into the paper to avoid pastel dust. Larger makes bigger prints. I don’t recommend making prints any larger than the artwork, even if you take a photo with a camera that gets a huge file size. Artwork doesn’t looks good blown up larger. If your artwork is larger, you can print large or small and the prints will look good. Smaller art limits your print size. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I have a naturally light hand so working on sanded art papers requires a definite adjustment in working methods.

This paper has a completely different texture compared to the Canson Mi-Teintes Touch and it is also available in board format. The Canson Mi-Teintes has a soft vellum texture on one side and a honeycomb or dimpled texture on the other. It is a pulp dyed paper that contains 60% cotton, it can be used with a multitude of different media, such as pastel, pencil, charcoal, gouache, watercolour and sanguine. It is also a popular paper amongst crafters. Fabriano Tiziano Pastel Paper Of the two, the Art Paper was definitely the easiest to work with. At 9″ X 12″ it can even be cut in half or in quarters for small practice session, or cards or just about anything. There’s a total of six colors, so I might just wait a few more days before buying anything more expensive. :thumbsup: Fixative can help to keep your applied marks of pastel looking fresh, crisp and increase their smudge-resistance, however fixatives also have a tendency to darken colours, and whites tend to become transparent. Work on coated papers will require fixing less than those on uncoated papers as their texture is more able to hold colour in place. However if you wish to further secure your marks onto the surface without using fixative you can ‘pressure fix’ your work: Lay a sheet of glassine over the artwork and press it gently and evenly without moving the glassine. This will push the particles more firmly into the paper texture. Sennelier pastel paper is available only in a warm grey shade while Clairefontaine Ingres comes in twenty colours across the whole spectrum, and is the only Ingres paper that is 100% cotton. Cotton is naturally acid-free, which means it has more longevity than wood or other cellulose pulp as it has the fewest impurities. The long fibres of cotton are also stronger so the paper can take more rubbing when you erase or blend, and it is also less likely to discolour over time. I still have some Wallis and do like it. I’m sure Kitty will get the manufacturing sorted out eventually. But the demand always exceeded the supply. She added a new color the last time it was available, a variation on Belgian Mist that was warmer.You don’t need sharp pencils to work with sanded paper. In fact, sharp pencils can be a detriment. They break easily on the gritty surface, and even if they don’t, you get two or three strokes before they go blunt. This is a heavyweight acid-free ingres paper, containing a high cotton rag content (40%) that has a high archival permanence. Ingres papers are often much cheaper than coated papers, the Fabriano Tiziano pastel paper is an excellent quality option. The fluffy velour texture is made from a coating of fine polyester fibres. Compared to papers like ingres, it’s much harder to smudge pastel across the paper. Pigments pretty much stay put where you draw with them. Best soft pastel paper

The paper feels soft and is gentle on pastel tools, such as sponges. Pastelmat’s coating is water resistant, so artists can paint with wet media.

PanPastels

So, basically Pastel Premier is in fact the reincarnation off Wallis, with some tweaks that were necessary for a consistently precise product. Gathers information for WordPress by themselves, first party analytics tool about how WP services are used. A collection of internal metrics for user activity, used to improve user experience.

Use the discount code cpmagicdiscount1 to get 10% off the magazine when you buy 5 to 9 issues. Looking for more than that? Buy 10 or more issues and you can save 20% off the cover price with the discount code cpmagicdiscount2. INDENT] On the phone the other day with Global Art Materials, Inc. – the folks who provide Pastel Premier papers – I heard something that you might find interesting.

Some nice white stuff I pulled out of my printer’s feed box. Very smooth, but it must have some tooth because I could put four layers on it before the dust started falling off.