The harsh truth about soft pastels

My old flatmate gave me a brand new box of soft pastels when he moved out, about a year ago now, and so they sat, untouched, at the bottom of my sock drawer...until I moved to Shoreditch and noticed them there, incongruous and forgotten at 2am on a Tuesday morning, and decided to give the chalky bits of rainbow poo a whirl. But fountainous creativity that I thought would produce a delicate smudgy portrait fizzed into disgusting pop art:



I totally got overzealous and ended up with too many colours mixing and harsh cartoony lines...I mean, in theory, pastels are rad - they're chalky but saturated, so it misleads you into thinking you can almost-erase colours by "painting" over each other - not quite so. The shit gets messy. You gotta keep blowing on what you're drawing or else it turns into a sand mandala after a tornado.

Reckon minimalism is the way forward in the realm of pastels, in terms of both colours and strokes...I still heart Chewy though - see? Heart on lower right.

Next session slated for Wednesday at 3am.