Back to the studio, Blue soft pastels
It's only January, but my Baby Mamut blue soft pastel stock is starting to run out... It is quite curious… it seems that the pastel sets of blue ranges are the ones that my clients like the most.
Yesterday I realized that it's time to redo almost all of them... And although my production time starts in spring, I'm already back at the studio. It's cold here... Even with the stove doing his job. But just seeing the pots full of pigments, and opening my notebooks again with recipe notes and tests cheers me up, and without realizing it, the hours go by.
“Blue Soft Pastel on Ultramarine pigment”, Soft Pastels ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels
Mixing Ultramarine blue and dark pigments, ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
Prussian blue ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
I love working with blue pigments. With Prussian Blue, with light blue, with Ultramarine Blue... creating mixtures and seeing how they develop. I am fascinated to see how I can go from a blue as deep and opaque as the darkness of a deep sea to a light blue, just by adding a few pinches of white…
Now I'm interested in getting some specific blues. Replicating colors is a delicate task that takes time and requires patience until the correct proportions are adjusted.
Mixing pure pigments and adjusting tones in search for an exact color is like going into a trance.
A Prussian Blue dough ready for mixiing, Mamut Pastels ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
Testing the color, looking for the right hue of blue at the studio. ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
Mixing blues ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels
It is putting aside all worries and distractions, while that color takes its place. Meanwhile, outside of this almost obsessive process, nothing important remains... One color leads me to another and another, until I reach the desired one. And that's all I'm focusing on.
Many people think that blue was always in the interest of the society of each era but it is rather the opposite. Purple was the most relevant color in the Roman Empire. It was a dye discovered by the Phoenicians.
Mixing color, Mamut pastels. ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
Working at the studio. ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
Preparing and labeling two set of blues… Mamyt Soft Pastels. ©photo by Alain, Mamut Pastels 2022
They extracted it from a marine mollusk, the Murex brandaris. The blue we know today, chosen as pantone of the year 2020, is far from the old blue. The first known blues came from minerals such as cobalt, lapis-lazuli or azurite.
Unlike other colors such as ocher, earth, brown, blue was always scarce. Due to the difficulty of finding azurite, and the need to cover a high demand for this color, the Egyptians synthesized blue with a mixture of silica, lime, copper and an alkali.
Mamut Soft Pastel set, selection of 21 blues. ©photo by, Mamut Pastels 2022
Nowadays ultramarine blue is synthetic and easy to acquire. Its use has become widespread and is used in all artistic techniques such as oil, watercolor, tempera or soft pastel.
