I’m excited today because my package from Amazon arrived! (Who doesn’t like getting stuff in the mail?!) One of my gifts (to myself) was this set of Mungyo Pastels. This is the 64 color set. Pretty huh? 
So I’m playing with pastels today and working on my coloring entries for Peta Hewitt’s coloring contest. Peta is an amazing artist and colorist from Australia and I regularly stalk her wonderful YouTube channel la-artistino.com. Peta Hewitt la-artistino.com Her coloring contest is Australian based and includes 3 special pictures drawn by Peta around the flowers and animals of Australia theme. If you want to give it a try, visit Peta’s website at the link above for more information. 
This is my test page for Peta’s sugar glider picture. I’m testing several ways of blending the pastels as well as looking at how it layers over colored pencils and how dark I can take the background without going black. The yellow steaks on the above picture are prismacolor soft core canary yellow. I started with light color combos then moved darker still blending. I’ve been using a paper towel over finger tips to blend. You can see at the right top the yellow pencil under pastel pink is a nice blend. The dark blue over it shows a blend, just not one I’ll use much!
Here I’m trying to see how dark I can go without going black. I plan to use this technique in my coloring books and it will be important to keep the pages sprayed with a workable fixative such as Krylon. I’ll also keep blank sheets of paper between the pages I’ve worked on to prevent smudging. 
Here in the bottom right is about as dark as it will go. I also switched from a paper towel for smudging to a q-tip. It’s much smoother and softer looking. I also stopped putting pastel on the paper and started loading the q-tip by swiping it along the top of the pastel. These are so soft you don’t need to scrape it off which will save on wasted pastels! Also I wanted to mention, if you get it someplace you don’t want it (an almost certainty with pastels, you can easily erase any mistakes. And lastly, when using with colored pencils, whatever kind, remember the wax in the pencils puts down a protective layer so if you get pastel over pencil it wipes right off. It makes pastels ideal for coloring books where you’ve use colored pencils for the design and want a soft background. I’m not sure yet whether if you want it to stay over the pencil if the fixative spray will keep it there. Ah! An experiment for another day!
I love these Mungyo Pastels and this 64 color set was under $10 USD on Amazon.com.
I will post my finished entries as soon as they are finished. They may look like grade school art projects but I’ll have fun doing them!
The Tireless Tangler 