How Different Pastel Pencils Draw on Thick vs Thin Soft Pastel Layers

hi everyone this is just a quick demonstration of how the thickness of your soft pastel Bas layers can affect your pencil details on top not only that each pastel pencil brand comes with different properties some pencils are harder and therefore deposit less pigment whereas other pencil brands are softer and deposit pigments more easily so on the left here I'm applying this pigment with my Unison color soft pastel stick using a hard pressure and you can see that the paper is fully covered with no gaps and it's just a lot of pigment and pestel just here I'll blend this out using my soft sponge tool and then move on to the next Swatch here we will instead use much less pressure to apply the pigment you can still see some of the paper showing through which is a good sign and when I come to blend this out you can see that a little goes a long way and those white gaps are easily covered this thinner layer of pigment fills in the tooth of the paper less than the previous thick Swatch meaning that our pastel pencil details Will Go On Top much easier lastly here I thought I would also include the sponge transfer method where I can take a scrap piece of Pastor mat board apply the pigment to the board and then use my soft sponge tool to pick up the pigment and transfer it over to the Swatch even though this can be a timec consuming method I find that it always creates the thinnest and softest base layer it also has the added benefit of figuring out the colors before you apply them to your artwork so if you need to mix two or more colors together to achieve the exact tone that you're looking for you can experiment on the the scrapbo before applying them to your artwork so here are the three finished swatches and you can see that they look slightly different in terms of intensity but I'll now show you how seven different white pastel pencil Brands deposit on top we'll go in order from the hardest pastel pencil brand to the softest in my opinion first up is the Faber Castle pastel pencils and I'm going to first apply three hard pressure line swatches and then three light pressured lines you can see straight away that the thinner base layers allow the pencils to dep it much more opaque lines on top next we'll Swatch the dant pastel pencils you'll also notice that the light pressured swatches are able to produce thinner lines but you can see that you need the thinner base layers to give them a chance to show this is because the more excess pigment you have in your base layer will fill in the tooth of the paper making it harder for your pencils to deposit their pigments on top next up here is the coor brand featuring a gradually after pastel core as we go through the different brands I'm continuing to draw the three hard pressure lines and then three light pressure lines for each of the base layer swatches already I think you can see how the different thickness in base layers can affect your pencil details and moving on to the brunal here you can see that the tip just snapped under the hard pressure which is more common as the pastel course becomes softer on the other hand I often find that the Faber Castle tips hardly ever snap because they are on the harder side so now I'll do the same with the stabo Carbell brand which is one of my go-to they're somewhere in between the softest and hardest brand so they're sort of suitable for many different tasks you can start to see the opacity and intensity of the lines increase as those pastel cores become increasingly softer now the con AP Paris brand is very soft in my opinion even giving the thick base layer a run for its money again as the core becomes softer it's easier for the tip to snap so I just need to be careful when applying a hard pressure but here you can see how opaque these lines are and last but not least we have the kar Dash pastel pencils which are the softest in my opinion they're Chinese white which is what I'm using here is well known to be the whitest white available and you can see just how opaque it is really handy for details such as bright Reflections in ice for example so anyway I hope this video was helpful for you feel free to take a photo or screenshot of this result for future reference if you would like to you may look at these results and only choose to go with the con a Paris or Karen Dash brand because of their buttery smooth and easily opaque lines while I think these brands are great to have in your collection it's also important not to sleep on those harder Brands too as they will come in handy especially for detailed thin marks for example I just hope that this video really gets across the importance of having less pigment in your base layers like I said a little goes a long way with soft pastel sticks anyway any way that's it now for this video if you find it helpful it would mean the will to me if you could give this video a thumbs up which also helps others to find it too and if you would like more similar helpful content feel free to give me some ideas in the comments and also to subscribe so you don't miss out on those future videos I also have a patron Channel with hundreds of hours of tutorial content if you're looking to take your skills even further you can find the link to that in the description thanks again for watching and I hope to see you in the next one before you go feel free to pick up my soft pastel and pastel pencils beginner ebook it's free and yours to download and keep forever