How do I work with soft pastels without it turning into dust?

Soft pastel is the most direct colour medium there is — the stick is essentially compressed pigment, and what you put down is what you see, with no drying shift at all. The price is fragility. There is a finite amount of tooth in a sheet of paper and every layer uses some of it, so the entire technique is organised around not wasting it.

Step by step

1. Choose the surface first, because it decides everything.Sanded pastel papers and boards hold many more layers than ordinary pastel paper and are worth the cost. Traditional laid or honeycomb-textured pastel paper takes fewer layers but gives a lovely broken texture. Cartridge and smooth papers take almost nothing.
2. Use a toned ground.Working on mid-toned paper means you can go both lighter and darker, and any paper showing through unifies the picture. White paper sparkling through pastel is distracting and hard to eliminate.
3. Block in with hard pastels or pastel pencils.Hard pastels and pastel pencils contain more binder, deposit less material and leave the tooth largely intact. Establish the whole composition and value structure with these before any soft pastel touches the paper.
4. Work light pressure to heavy, hard sticks to soft.This is the governing rule. Soft pastel used early fills the tooth and everything after it slides off. The softest, most brilliant sticks come out last, for the highlights and the accents.
5. Keep the board near vertical.Pastel dust falls constantly. On a flat board it lands on the picture and contaminates every colour. Upright, it falls into a tray or onto the floor, and the picture stays clean.
6. Blend sparingly and deliberately.Fingers, a rag, a stump or a soft brush all work, but every blend fills tooth and mutes the colour. Some passages should stay as broken, unblended marks — that vibration is what pastel does better than any other medium.
7. Use optical mixing rather than physical mixing.Layering broken strokes of two colours so the eye mixes them keeps far more brilliance than rubbing them together. Rubbed pastel greys off quickly.
8. Knock back a wrong area with a stiff brush or a rubber shaper.A hog brush flicks loose pigment off and reopens the tooth to a useful degree. Erasers largely do not work on pastel and grind it in.
9. Protect the finished work immediately.Fix lightly if at all, then get it behind glass with a spacer so nothing touches the surface. Interleave with glassine for storage. Loose pastel is genuinely at risk from a single careless movement.

Tips

• Keep the sticks separated by colour family in trays of dry rice or ground rice — it cleans them as you rummage and stops every stick becoming the same grey.
• Wear a dust mask for extended sessions and never blow dust off the picture. Pastel dust is fine pigment and there is no reason to breathe it.
• Snap sticks in half deliberately. A short piece used on its side is the main tool for broad passages, and you stop worrying about breakages.
• Oil pastels are a completely different material — bound in oil and wax, never dusty, do not blend the same way and cannot be fixed with the same product. Do not mix them into a soft pastel painting.

Common mistakes

• Starting with the softest, most brilliant sticks — They fill the paper's tooth in one layer, and every subsequent mark slides off the top and drops away. Save them for last.
• Working flat on a table — Falling dust contaminates the picture continuously and every colour becomes a version of the same mid grey.
• Blending everything with a finger — It fills the tooth, greys the colour and removes exactly the sparkle that makes pastel worth using.
• Using cartridge paper because it is what you have — It holds two layers at most and the work will never develop. Surface is not a place to economise in pastel.

If it doesn't work

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