Sunday, September 26, 2010

dust

The excess pastel dust (all colors mixed together) from my paintings falls into an aluminum-foil gutter attached to my easel. When I cleaned my easel this week, I poured the dust from the gutter onto a glass palette that is usually used for mixing oil paint, added water and mixed it well with a palette knife to the consistency of stiff peanut butter. Next, I sprayed a clean area of the glass with water and laid down a piece of plastic wrap (the water keeps the wrap from moving around). I scooped up the pastel-blob with the palette knife and plopped it onto the wrap. I picked up two opposing edges of the wrap and rolled the blob side-to-side forming a little log.  I left it on the plastic wrap to dry.

A few days later, when it was thoroughly dry, I compared the muted gray/green color to the color of pastels I already had. Schmincke 093 H is darker and a Rembrandt color is lighter and has more yellow in it. I love my homemade color and plan to use it in my next painting.

9 comments:

  1. That's a great idea! And the color your created is beautiful and obviously useful. A green habit, to be sure.

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  2. I would love to hear from others what color their dust-color turns out to be. Let me know if you do it.

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  3. I once made an unfortunate reddish brown color from pastel dust. I've seen others use their dust to gray down a bright color.

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  4. Thank you so much for posting this, Barbara. I never knew it was so easy!

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  5. Well, Jeannette, that's how I did it to get all that dust into one stick so I could use it. The REAL way to do it was posted by Casey Klahn in Oct 2007. Here's a link to his post http://pastelsblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/making-your-own-pastels.html

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  6. Thank you, Brabara for your post. I thik that the dust-color should turn out a splendid reddish grey or greenish grey,. I'll try it surely.

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  7. It's a short hop from doing this, to making pure tone sticks with pigment. A third French Talc, a third Whitting, and a third (or more) pigment. I get my supplies at DS.

    Your grey looks nice, Barbara!

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  8. Hi Barb. I do this too with my fallen dust. I collect it into two separate containers. One for warmer greys, and the other for cooler greys. I'll put the dust into a ziplog baggie so to keep the fine particles from drifting everywhere and add water. It's always a surprise what comes out!

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  9. Brenda, I JUST found your comment almost 4 months late! Thanks for the suggestion.

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