Drawing paper and card are the best for the 1st attempts at rich pastel drawing. The main thing is they have a roughened surface, instead of a smooth surface that won't hold the pigment dust of the pastels. You may even use inexpensive ingrain or wrapping paper. The grit of watercolor or heavy paper holds pastel strokes well and are fantastic for making photos with one or two layers of paint. The watercolor paper may also be coloured with watercolors before painting with pastels.
Otherwise, be ready to use pastels on specific kinds of paper with a granular structure. They're available in numerous different colours. Ingres pastel paper has fine, smooth lines. Against this, the Mi-Teintes pastel paper has a grid that's harking back to fine wire mesh. If the grid granularity of the Mi-Teintes paper is too coarse for a selected motive, you may use the "wrong", smooth side.
Special papers with coarse grain size : Sansfix, velvet and sandpaper
Sansfix, velvet and sandpaper are papers on which can be built awfully thick layers of paint. While suede paper has a velvety surface formed of soft lines, Sansfix and sandpaper provide assorted grits. Sandpaper shows the coarsest granulation. If you make a decision to do an extraordinarily pretty, multi-layered work, you want to use velvet, Sansfix or sandpaper. These papers hold the pastel pigments so firmly it's very hard to smear them with a finger or fabric. This permits you to layer virtually never-ending new coats of paint. there are drawbacks to using these speciality papers : they aren't inexpensive and they "eat" the pastels, literally. You want a lot more color than, say, on Ingres or Mi-Teintes paper. Since some methods of pastel painting, particularly that of smearing, won't work on coarse paper, the colours can't be mixed. New mixes of colours need to be made thru the superimposition of layers of paint.
This could help reach a bigger depth and makes it nonessential to treat the painting with an intensive quantity of fixative. The utilising of coloured papers in pastel painting
Normal pastels are used on colored paper and pastel papers are available in various colours. Many of them are neutral beige, brown or grey. Working on colored paper has a hardheaded reason : it is commonly tricky, or maybe most unlikely, to cover the whole sheet with pastel color. A white painting surface, which shows thru, may give the painting a disturbing appearance.
Coloured paper lends a certain basic clay-tone to the whole design, standardizing the color. It can take over its own role in the organization of the design and stress light and shade approvingly.
Neutral paper in middle clay-tone value is affecting a design little. Bright pastels on a dark painting surface , for example black or dark grey paper, can lose their lightness. Dark paper absorbs light shades. Even intense colours like red and green can finish up looking pale.
Ways to select the right paper
Dependent on the topic, softer suede or rougher sansfix can be best. Finding the best them for each paper requires some experience. It is , useful to paint a design on different papers, so that you can appraise the different effects. Even more hard is choosing the proper shade of paper, as you must have already got the last image under consideration when making your selection.
Most newbies should select a neutral colour of paper, but again, experiment. Institutions like www.AcademyArt.edu art schools will tell you which type is best; however, what's most important is your choice of paper. What feels most comfortable to you? Try your painting first on a neutral base paper, then again with a coloured paper that goes with the subject, such a blue-gray paper for a landscape with the sky or sea. Deliberately leave some pieces of the picture bleached. Then paint your picture on a 3rd paper, whose color contrasts with the primary colour of the topic, and compare your drawings.