You are soooo very welcome Leticia! My pleasure for sure.

Janette I am delighted to have introduced you to this fine and oh-so-lovely artist!! Glad Lyn’s words and work struck a chord with you.

Woooow! How beautiful! Such a wonderful artist! Thanks Gail for sharing her paintings with us!!!

Hi Barbara. So glad that you to hear your enthusiasm for Pastel. I don’t use fixative at all for a number of reasons . 1. It darkens and dulls the work 2. It can still be smudged 3. It doesn’t stop the pastel dust from falling off, it just falls off in bigger bits. Pressing the pastel into the surface with a cover sheet of glassine and a stack of books (or something similar) achieves what the fixative is supposed to do without the negative results. I’ve even been known to put mine through a press, again with the protective sheet of glassine. I do know however (from my time spent with Daniel Greene) that sometimes an artist might use fixative to deliberately darken a passage of work and then tweak the brights and lights. Also, if the tooth of the paper is filled or damaged then the use of fixative can give a new surface to work on although this is limited.
A sharp Exacto blade is good for sharpening pastel pencils and sandpaper to get a fine point. Some of the pencils just want to keep on breaking which probably means that they have been dropped somewhere along the way.
Hope that this all helps. Happy painting.

Hi Diane. I’m sadly almost to the end of my stash of Wallis paper but I have discovered Fisher 400 which to my mind is as close as I’ve experienced thus far. It was unavailable for a little while but I think that it is back in circulation now.

Thanks for popping in Barbara and for your exuberance! Lyn answered the pastel pencil question above and I will let her answer your question around using fixative.
I hope someone has an answer for you around sharpening pastel pencils as I rarely use them. I have found in the past that sharpening them with a knife has worked.

Glad you enjoyed Lyn’s work. Well you can see the supports Lyn uses. I think many of us have struggled to find good replacements for Wallis paper. I am really enjoying Pastel Premier paper though, like you, I have run into a few inconsistency problems. I think they may have the technique resolved though. I do like the different grades of UART. I also like Sennelier LaCarte (just don’t get water anywhere near it!). I haven’t had too much experience with Art Spectrum but did find when I used it that it ‘ate’ the pastel. Perhaps others will chime in here.

You got that right Ruth! Regarding the use of pencils, going by her answer above, sounds like Lyn uses the sharp edges of pastels for the detail.

Thanks Wendy! I was sooooo delighted that Lyn agreed to guest blog!!