Soft Pastel Palette - Cleaning and organising it.

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." Vincent Van Gogh

My soft pastel needs cleaning and organising from time to time. With time it gathers dust and some pastel colours as it rubs against the neighboring pastels. This makes It difficult to identify each individual shade.

On earlier occasions I used rice in an old jar to shuffle the dusty pastels and they would come sparkling clean. Click here to watch my earlier post of 2014.This time I decided to use Semolina or finely ground wheat, to execute this process. To my surprise it worked pretty well. So after the clean up I organised them neatly into four different trays segregating the blues, greens, browns and the rest of the colours.

Posting few images below.

The Blues and the Greens
in two small cardboard boxes.

The very light shades and warm colours put together.
And the browns and violets put separately in another flat box.

The jar of Semolina in which I drop in the

Broken pastels for a clean up.

Now my soft pastels are finally cleaned up and are set up in four different boxes in a pretty much organised manner. Previous to this arrangement I was managing with ONE TRAY and later on it shifted to THREE TRAYS of pastels. The size of the palette keeps on increasing with time. I guess it happens with all the artists. 

The different brands of pastels that I have put together are MUNGYO, GALLERY, CAMLIN and KOH-I-NOOR TOISON DOR. By placing them together in a palette it is so much more convenient at my work place rather than opening up all the different boxes individually. This arrangement is working good for me, however I have plans to add a few more brands of pastels later in my collection.

What brands of pastels do you use for your artworks? Do share your views by writing down your comments. You can also view my works now on INSTAGRAM where I have started posting on a regular basis.

Thanks for browsing and all your support.