My very first soft pastel drawing!!! (art journal)

ugh, so if I can't spray the drawing, what should I do about shipping it? I don't want it smudging during transportation. I was thinking about taking 2 sheets of tracing paper and putting paper clips in the far corners to keep the surfaces rom rubbing against the drawing and then shipping it out in a cardboard envelope.

Any thoughts on this?

Spraying won't stop the smudging much at all with pastel. Been there done that, touch it and a chunk will come off and the colours also fade over time.
This is the one big drawback of pastel- shipping is damn hard and costly!
I am lucky working in a radiology department, so have a plentifull supply of different sized xray films boxes which are the perfect size for shipping drawings in!
What I do is lay the drawing in the box, and put triangles of foam in the corners of the box so that they hold the edges of the drawing down. Then on top of that I put a sheet of 'plastic cardboard' resting on the foam so it doesn't touch the drawing. Then wrap the box in bubble wrap, put it into a padded postage bag and send it registed mail. It usually costs me about AUD$15-$20 to send it this way but I've never had a problem with drawings getting damaged in transit.

I did notice in doing some research that artists do generally charge quite a bit more for soft pastel drawings than for graphite or colored pencil. I know now why that is...more expensive materials and apparently more expensive shipping.

Well, this person got a heck of a deal on this drawing. Between shipping and my 50% donation to the horse resuce, my net profit will probably be pretty close to 0...lol.

Lesson learned.

Oh yeah, and here is the second pastel drawing I did of the gray horse. I took your advice with the blues and purples and even added a little yellow in the mane. Not quite a "realistic" drawing, but I am sure refining my color combinations will all come with practice.

This drawing was a real rush job. I only whipped this out today. Just wanted to get a feel for the colors, blending options, etc.

Attached Images

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Haha yep Liz don't worry I did the same when I started pastels, charged next to nothing for them! Always work out how much it's going to cost you in materials, how much time you are going to spend on it and the quality of your drawing skills. Then add the shipping costs onto that. (Always mention when advertising/quoting that extra shipping cost, don't just tack it onto the total cost as they will panic and think it's going to be super expensive!!)

I am absolutely in love with your grey!!! Although it's not all that realistic as you stated, I can really see that you've been playing with those colours underneath to get some depth into it. Once you get some more experience with layering your colours, you'll be able to make them less obvious, so that someone looking at the drawing who doesn't know about how many colours go into it, wouldn't have a clue that there is a heap of green/blue/red or whatever in there, but to look closely, the majority of the drawing actually is those bright, solid colours. You judt dont know it! -hard to explain, that didn't make much sense but after doing a few pastels you'll figure it out haha!

makes perfect sense!!!

Looks great!


I, personally, am a pastel-waster. Instead of leaving white blocks I layer in with a "base" color and then layer in and layer in in smaller colors. Usually I start with a blue or green and pastel the whole canvas, then start working up from there.

Yeah sixxofdiamonds, thats what I was saying before about layering, just blocking the initial first layers, then slowly work into getting your detail and closer to life colours ;)