Colour is a magical thing. I rarely indulge myself, but the reduced box of 48 gorgeous artists quality pastels in the local art shop was too much. I was enchanted. They are deliciously crumbly, almost (I imagine) melt-in-the-mouth Edinburgh Rock soft (which can’t be a bad thing). I don’t use pastels very often, as it happens. Only one book, “BOY” was produced entirely in pastels. But for my current project “Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake” I need a Romantic softness and I’ve been using a lot of pastels, including some giant hand-made Italian ones called Kremer. It’s amazing how far you need to go to find just the right colour. Usually it’s the very pale ones I need, because the standard cheap pastels generally available are far too garish. And the pale ones are really hard to find.
I haven’t tried the new set yet. The prism-rainbow colours are too lovely to spoil, but I daresay in time they’ll end up like my other tatty old sets, covered in pastel dust (like me and my books and records and nik-naks). I’m reminded how every Christmas I’d get a new set of felt-pens, all in a rainbow arc of colour in a plastic wallet. I’d spend many a happy hour putting them in some sort of order. Perhaps I’ll do the same with these. They deserve a little more respect than the other crumbly old sets. And they come in a lovely wood box, which makes them seem even more cherishable.
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