Soft pastel techniques and tips. We want to inspire you – with our finest quality and rich colors. Have you ever tried drawing with soft pastels? If you have, then you already know how much fun it is to create pictures with soft pastels. We want to encourage you as a beginner: soft pastels allow you to draw casually and spontaneously. Not everything will be perfect from the word go, but it does not matter because soft pastel drawings can be easily corrected. Practicing the techniques shown below and doing creative work will reward you with a sense of delight. Get started now and give all the techniques and tips here a try! What a color! Soft Pastel Art Tutorial Are soft pastels used for drawing or painting? You can do both with soft pastels because the rectangular shape of the pastel sticks allows you to draw lines as well as color in areas. This blurs the boundary between drawing and painting. You will notice it immediately on very gentle strokes: Applying soft pastels is a very spontaneous process and the color applied can be easily blended. This is because the pigments in a soft pastel are only minimally compressed and the soft pastel contains an extremely low percentage of binders. Soft pastels can create such flowing and soft gradients like no other drawing or painting mediums. Faber-Castell soft pastels are available in two lengths: the standard and the mini format. The right paper Not all papers are equal. So what is the right kind of paper for soft pastels? Textured, rough-grained papers that allow pigments to stick well to their surface offer the optimal adhesion. Smooth papers are less suitable for this. When starting out, try not to make things too difficult for yourself and choose special papers available in shops designed for pastels. Such papers offer the best possible surface and give you the freedom to fully concentrate on drawing. Once you become slightly more familiar with handling pastels, you can also try using watercolor paper, canvas, pasteboard or wood as a substrate. Always make sure that the substrate used is acid-free in order to prevent the unpleasant yellowing of your picture.