Testing Mamut soft Pastels

After several months of work, some other months of testing, and some more spend on pastels production I finally (finally!) release officially Mamut as a Soft Pastel brand… And of course the Mamut pastels website!!

Some of the Soft Pastels ready for testing. ©photo by Alain Bañon, Mamut Pastels 2021

It is and still being a wonderful experience and an incredible journey full of surprises, problems, fails, solutions, questions and answers, and of course, colors! Lots of colors all the way…

Testing new Ochre soft pastels, ©photo by Alain Bañon, Mamut Pastels 2021

In fact, it is continuous growth! Fortunately, I count on the invaluable help of a great professional pastelist Graciela Bombalova, (from Bogra art studio) who is assessing me, testing and suggesting about colors, texture, etc., and following the process of creating and developing Mamut Pastels... It wouldn't have been possible without her and her deep knowledge on this amazing technique to be where we are now.

Graciela Bombalova testing Mamut Pastels. ©photo by Alain Bañon, Mamut Pastels 2021

Creating handmade pastels is a long delicate process!
Finding the perfect texture, shape, and resistance of the pastel bars is something intuitive, based on many tests, observations, and pauses. 
The existing old recipes are incomplete... Everything varies so much depending on the pigment to use! On the other side, many of the old ingredients and methods used before had changed over the last two centuries, like the use of Milk or Cochineal, etc.  

Colors, ©photo by Alain Bañon, Mamut Pastels 2021

Pastels are fragile, delicate. So is the line between soft and breakable, and all the pigments are different and react in their own way to mixes, proportions, rolling and a long list of variables.

Producing pastels is also physically hard work to do… It all starts with preparing the perfect dough, then it needs to rest sometime, so the pastels can be well rolled by hand, and dried in the sun until feel perfect to the touch.

Shadows ©photo by Alain Bañon, Mamut Pastels 2021

Then each one of the bars is carefully labeled, combined in a selection of color ranges, and placed in its handmade wooden box… A complete manual process that cannot be replaced by machines getting the same results.