Soft Pastel
- chalk pastel
- pastel drawing
- chalk
Dry pigment dragged across textured paper, sitting on the surface and catching the tooth.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Pastel is pigment with almost nothing holding it together, so it sits on the surface rather than soaking in. The colour is therefore at full strength and slightly unstable, which is why pastel pictures glow and why they smudge if you look at them.
How it works
Dry sticks are dragged over heavily textured paper. Colour catches on the raised tooth and skips the hollows. Edges are blended with a finger. Crumbs of pigment sit loose on the surface. Light colours go over dark ones without mixing, and the paper colour shows through throughout.
When to use it
Use it for warmth, portraiture and anything that should look worked by hand. Avoid it for precision, because the medium cannot make a clean edge.
Told apart from its neighbours
Watercolour Bleed soaks into the paper and is transparent. Limited Palette Dry Brush uses paint and a brush rather than dry pigment. Ramp Shading is a flat digital finish with no texture at all.
Where it is used
It carries a book cover, a portrait, a packaging illustration and any picture that should feel physically present.
- Portraiture and figure drawing
- Book covers, packaging and editorial
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<character> drawn in soft pastel, dry pigment dragged across heavily textured paper so the colour catches on the tooth and leaves the hollows bare, visible grain across every area with no solid flat fill anywhere, edges blended by a finger with a soft smudge rather than a line, small loose crumbs of pigment sitting on the surface, pale colours laid over dark ones without mixing into them, the paper colour showing through everywhere and doing part of the work
What goes wrong
A smooth soft digital painting comes back. Ask for heavy paper tooth, the hollows left bare, and loose crumbs of pigment on the surface.
Leave out
a smooth fill, hard edges, gloss, wet blending, fine detail, a white background
Watch for
The paper shows through. A pastel never fully covers, and asking for the tooth and the paper colour to remain is what stops a model returning a smooth digital painting.
Questions
Draw it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
