Playing with Pastels (no not Pan...)

Hello everyone and thank you for dropping in here today.

Recently I have been much inspired by the beautiful work of Maria from Maria's Knutsel Plezier. She makes the most amazing backgrounds but just in the last few days has been playing with Pan Pastels.
Well that gave me the inspiration to try something just a little different:

Now to be really honest, I am not a huge fan of Pan Pastels I only have very few colours, but I loved what Maria did with them, so I started to experiment with something else. I have a small set of  Faber Castell Polychromo Pastels which I use occasionally for my other art work (that I don't blog here). I love these pastels, there is nothing quite like them. They blend like nothing else I have come across, just using your finger in a piece of cotton fabric (I use cheesecloth)
This is what the pastels look like:

You rub them onto your finger (inside the cheesecloth) and then start to blend in a circular motion onto your paper. I used smooth stamping card but they work brilliantly on water colour paper too. Oh and just in case you are wondering , - no I am not on Faber Castell's Design Team or anything (wished I was), I just love these pastels lol

For this one I blended my two blues, a tiny bit of the pinky red and the orangy yellow. Around the edges though I used a Pan Pastel brown. The Pan is much more powdery and "solid" in colour and you have to use it very lightly for this technique. Next I stamped the poppies and grasses (Chocolate Baroque) in embossing ink and then rubbed my pastels over it again. I coloured the image with Distress Markers and my water brush. I then masked it, stamped a Darkroom Door script stamp in random places and added a swirl stamp from Stempel Glede around the edges. Then I rubbed over it again with my pastels to bring out the detail.

For the next one I first ran my piece of card through a little snow flake embossing folder (a freebie that came with a magazine some years ago). I then used exactly the same technique but just the two blues and a tiny bit of brown again. The stamps are from Crafty Secrets and then the same script and swirl stamps.

I rubbed a tiny bit of Treasure Gold in Pewter over the snow flakes. I just love how the colours are so translucent and subtle. Very, very different from blending Distress Inks for instance. I'll try and show you the difference in the last one:

The main stamp is from Chapel Road Art Stamps and this time I used all of my colours. The apple sentiment however was done with Distress Inks, stamped in Potting Soil Archival, cut out and then adhered to the card.

You can no doubt see that the intensity of colour is very, very different. Don't get me wrong, I love my Distress Inks, it just all depends what effect you want to achieve.

Well hope you like my little exploration with pastels here and thank you for visiting!!