Soft Pastel and the Close Portrait
Why soft pastel suited close eighteenth-century portraits, and how its powdery colour behaves on paper today.
Soft pastel is almost pure pigment, held together with a weak binder and rolled into a stick. It draws and paints at once. In the eighteenth century it became a favoured medium for portraits, especially in France and Italy. Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Rosalba Carriera are among the artists whose names still attach to that vogue. The pictures are close, powdered with light, and often astonishingly specific in a face. The medium has not become easier to store since then.
Why pastel suited a face
A stick of colour can be hatched, smudged and laid over another colour without a long drying time. Sittings could move. The surface stays matte, so a cheek does not glare the way an oily highlight can. Strokes can stay visible, which gives skin a vibration not unlike the optical mixing in Pointillism: Dots, Optical Mix and Patience, though the touch is usually broader and softer.
The portraits are close because the medium is fragile and the detail rewards a near look. A pastel does not want to be a mural. It wants a sheet of paper and a viewer near enough to see the grain. That intimacy is part of the history, not an accident of framing.
Dust, tooth and a light hand
Pastel needs a paper with tooth, so the particles have somewhere to sit. On a slick sheet they brush off. Paper Weight and Tooth: What the Numbers Mean is the practical half. Lay light layers. If you grind the stick into the paper until the tooth is full, later colours will not hold and the surface burnishes.
The dust is real. It falls, it smears, and it should not be blown hard into the room if you can tap the sheet instead. Charcoal, Graphite or Ink for a Drawing shares the dust problem. Pastel adds colour to it. Wash your hands, and keep the sheet flat.
Fixative, glass and honesty
A light fixative can reduce smudging and can also dull the bloom that made the colour beautiful. Test on a scrap. Many finished pastels are framed under glass, with a gap so the glass does not touch the surface. That mount is not fussy. It is how a powdery picture survives. Do not varnish a pastel as if it were an oil. You will change it into a different, often sadder object.
Historically, these portraits were luxury objects. The medium's softness matched a fashion for graceful likeness. You can ignore the fashion and keep the method: direct colour, no liquid binder, a face or a single object at the size of the page.
A small modern use
Try a head or a piece of fruit with six sticks, not sixty. Leave some paper showing. If you only own hard pastels, expect a drier, more linear mark. Soft sticks are the ones that bloom. Label the sheet, because an unfixed portrait in a sketchbook will transfer. Keeping Sketchbook Pages Flat and Unsmudged applies twice over.
Look at an eighteenth-century example for the lightness of the touch, not for the wig. The touch is the part you can practise this week.
Frequently asked questions
Are oil pastels the same? No. Oil pastels are bound with oil and wax. They do not dust in the same way, and they do not erase or layer like soft pastel. The historical portraits are soft pastel.
Can I blend with a finger? You can, sparingly. A finger muddies as quickly as it softens. A light hatch of a second colour often stays fresher. Blend one passage, not the whole face.
Why do the colours look so clean? Little binder, no liquid mud, and paper showing through. The cleanliness is physical. Dirty sticks, mixed on a filthy cloth and ground into the sheet, will not look eighteenth-century. They will look grey.