Your first week of pastel drawing
Pastels reward you immediately — vivid color, real texture, no drying time. Here's what actually happens in your first seven days, from choosing your medium to completing your first finished piece.
By The JustBeginning Editors · Published May 24, 2026
Pastel has a reputation as a fussy medium — something grandmothers do on rainy days with delicate florals. That reputation is wrong. Pastel is physically immediate in a way that oil painting and watercolor are not: you pick up a stick, make a mark, and see full color on the first stroke. No palette setup, no drying time, no water-to-pigment ratios to calibrate.
The learning curve is real — blending, layering, and controlling the medium takes practice. But the feedback loop is short. You will make something genuinely pleasing in your first session. Here’s what to expect across your first week.
Day 1: Choose your medium and set up your workspace
Before you pick up a pastel, decide whether you’re starting with soft pastels or oil pastels. Most tutorials, books, and YouTube channels assume soft pastels — the chalk-dry kind that blend easily with your fingers. Oil pastels are waxy and require different technique. For your first week, start with soft pastels and a pad of Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper.
Your workspace needs two things: a hard surface behind your paper (a drawing board or a clipboard works), and something to prop it at a slight angle so pastel dust falls away from the drawing rather than sitting on it. Flat tables let dust accumulate and muddy your work.
One thing people skip and shouldn’t: order fixative before you start. You’ll want to spray your first finished piece, and waiting two days for fixative to arrive after a good drawing session is genuinely frustrating.
Days 2–3: Your first marks and the basics of blending
Your first real exercise is a color chart. Take a sheet of your pastel paper, divide it into squares, and fill one square per stick — all 48 colors, labeled. This sounds boring. It’s not. You’ll refer to this chart for months, and the act of making it teaches you how each stick behaves: which ones are harder, which are powdery, which spread easily and which resist.
After the chart, practice blending. Put down two adjacent colors — a warm orange and a cool yellow, or a dark blue and a medium blue — and blend them into each other using your finger. Then try a blending stump. Then try layering one color on top of another without blending at all, using hatched strokes. These three techniques — smooth blending, stump blending, and layered strokes — cover probably 80% of what you’ll do in your first year.
What beginners get wrong in the first session:
- Using too much pressure. Pastels don’t need force — the pigment transfers from light contact. Pressing hard uses up the stick fast and fills the paper tooth quickly.
- Starting with your best paper. Use cheap practice sheets for exercises. Save the Mi-Teintes for attempts you care about.
- Trying to erase. You can lift pastel slightly with a kneaded eraser, but erasing isn’t really how this medium works. Layer over mistakes instead.
Days 4–5: Your first complete drawing
Pick the simplest possible subject: one piece of fruit, a ceramic mug, or a plain glass bottle. Not a landscape, not a portrait. One object with clear light and shadow.
Start with your darkest tones and work toward your lightest. This is the opposite of how you’d approach pencil drawing, where you build from light marks to dark. With pastel, blocking in dark tones first gives you a tonal structure to work against, and light-colored pastels show up dramatically over dark backgrounds.
Spend more time observing than drawing. The most common beginner problem isn’t technical — it’s rushing. Look at your subject for ten seconds before every mark. Ask: where is the darkest value? Where is the lightest? What color is the shadow, actually? (It’s never just gray.)
When you’ve filled the paper and reached something resembling your subject, stop. Don’t overwork it. The point of this drawing isn’t to be finished — it’s to see what you’re drawn to and what frustrates you.
Day 6: Fixative and finishing
Take your first completed piece outdoors or near an open window. Shake your can of workable fixatif, hold it 12 inches from the paper, and spray in a light, even pass — like misting a plant, not hosing it down. Let it dry for 30 seconds, then do a second thin coat.
A few things will happen:
- Colors may darken slightly. This is normal and unavoidable.
- The surface will accept more pastel layers if you want to keep working.
- The piece will no longer smudge from casual contact.
Now store it between two sheets of glassine paper (smooth, non-stick) or in a flat portfolio. Don’t put it in a sleeve — the sleeve will pick up pigment even through fixative.
Day 7: Noticing what you actually want to do
After a week, you have a narrow but real sense of what the medium is like. The question worth sitting with: what subjects actually interest you?
Pastel artists tend to cluster around landscapes (the medium captures atmospheric light exceptionally well), portraiture (skin tones in pastel have a warmth that’s hard to match in oil), and florals (fast, expressive, forgiving of loose edges). All three are valid. None of them are what you pick in week one — you pick them after you’ve seen what you’re drawn to while you’re drawing.
At the end of week one, here’s what matters: did you make things? Did any of them surprise you? If yes to either, you’re exactly where you should be.
For your second week:
- Try a different subject (move from still life to a simple outdoor scene, or vice versa)
- Watch two Karen Margulis videos before your next session — she explains value and mark-making for landscapes with unusual clarity
- Consider whether you want to try sanded paper (UART) for a more layered, ambitious piece
Ready to buy your supplies? See our pastel drawing gear guide for the four things worth buying first and the half-dozen you can skip.