Most people think of pastel as a medium with lots of visual texture if you look closely, you can see that what looks like texture is actually specific marks. However, you can also manipulate your pastel drawing's appearance by blending the pastel. Even though this method appears smooth and without marks, it's still a form of marking to achieve a desired pastel effect, such as to set a toned foundation for the drawing or create delicate changes in values.
Here are some reasons artists blend pastels:
To make realistic soft value gradations, such as you might see in skin.
To tone specific areas so that you can mark over the areas without white areas showing through.
To soften textures that are too rough for the surface you are emulating or to soften edges to make objects appear to be farther away.
To blend colors, especially when massing colors in the first layers of the drawing.
Blending colors isn't difficult. Follow these easy steps to get the hang of it:
1. Lay down color in the areas you want to blend.
2. Softly rub the color into the paper with your blending tool of choice. If you're blending colors together, start rubbing the lighter color with circular motions into the darker color.
For the best control in blending specific areas, artists use stumps and tortillions. These are small rolled paper sticks that look like paper pencils. Stumps are sharpened on both ends, and tortillions are sharp on one end and blunt on the other. You can also use a chamois cloth, although it does tend to remove some of the pastel. Blending isn't a science, however. For large areas, simple paper towels or cotton socks can work. (We recommend using clean socks, for obvious reasons.) You can see how to blend pastel with different kinds of utensils. This figure shows blending with a tortillion, cotton tip, chamois, and a small piece of paper towel.Don't get stuck in one area, refining it at the expense of the rest of the composition. In the next layer, you observe and lay in the next smaller shapes within the shapes you already laid in. You continue developing these patterns until the smallest patterns are defined in the areas you want to emphasize.
