PanPastels Swatch
general journal junk
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idealog
If you're a user of PanPastels and want to make your own swatch sheet, there's a way you could do this with a gel printing plate that would handily seal the pastel so it doesn't flake off or rub off on another surface.
- Put a smudge of each colour you have on a paper surface of your choice - one with a bit of grab is best, so printmaking paper or coldpress watercolour paper.
- Label each swatch with its colour name/number, pigment info, and lightfastness rating.
- Cover your gel plate in a thin layer of gel medium.
- Place your swatched sheet face down on the plate and rub as you would with any other project on a gel plate.
There you have it! A swatched, labelled, and sealed chart of your PanPastels! You could do this with any other dry medium you'd want to seal up as well.
- While any notes you'd want to make on the chart later could be done on the back, if you wanted to do it on the front with the other information, it's going to prove problematic.
- However, there are fine-tipped pens that contain (or can be filled with) acrylic paint that could be used to write on a gel medium surface. Derwent makes a line of paint pens that would suit.
Clean:
- Gel plates also make a convenient way to clean off your PanPastel tools.
- Keep a gel plate handy and wipe the tools off on that.
- Since the surfaces of commercial gel plates are very grabby, a few good swipes seems to get most of the pastel off.
- The clean-off plate can then be covered in a thin layer of gel medium or acrylic colour of choice, and you can then lay the paper on that wet layer and allow it to dry. Voila. Abstract work, a background you can work into later, or something for collage.
Grabby:
- Handily, having a gel plate also makes for a simple way to get the spongy tips back onto the handled PanPastel tools if they're slipping off and you don't want to muss your hands up too much pushing them back on with your fingers.
- Just put the applicator against the gel plate so it's being grabbed by the surface, and push.
- You can get the tips off this way too, without having to touch them.