Diane Townsend's Artist's Soft Form Pastels 24-Set

Diane Townsend Artist's Pastels

Diane Townsend Artists’ Pastels are made from the purest pigments available to artists. Her emphasis is on maintaining the depth and clarity of each color, and allowing the character and texture of each pigment to be expressed. The pastels are entirely made by hand from the mixing of pigments to shaping the pastels to labeling and packaging, resulting in a fine drawing and painting tool. Her pastels are not combined with base of chalks, fillers or cheaper pigments, which can create uniformity in shape and texture, but which are lacking in richness and density. Townsend pastels do not build up a gray chalky film, therefore artists can rework their paintings without losing clarity.

Soft Form Pastels

The Townsend palette uses classical artist’s colors and an exotic and vivid range of modern pigments. The soft form pastels offer a specialty range of dark hues and off-blacks known for their softness and clarity, and a light range for excellent opacity and covering power. Many of the grays and mauves are mixed from complimentary colors with Light (L) and Dark (D) shades for a total of 360 colors. There are also 48 exotic colors in pearlescent, iridescent, metallic and fluorescent colors not represented here, for a total of 408 colors in all.

Diane Townsend about her Soft Form Pastels:

"The soft form palette contains both classical artists’ colors such as raw umber, ultramarine blue and cadmium red, and an exotic and vivid range of modern pigments such as naphthol red and the fluorescent pigments. I start with the pure shade of each color, of which there are about 35 different pigments that I use, and I  create mixes based on the pigments that work well together and look beautiful for artists today. You will find a Viridian hue(using Phthalo Green and a blue) and Alizarin hues (using Quinacridone magenta) reminiscent of Tintaretto and pale earth tones and greens based on Morandi’s paintings. I created the off blacks based on 19th century Navaho blankets and the off whites as one might see in Robert Ryman’s paintings. I worked as a figurative painter for 25 years and I developed colors hard to find in commercial pastels, in particular delicate pale tones observable on the surface of water or glass or skin color and the very dark tones to contrast the light. When I moved into abstract painting my attitude towards color became one of ” the simpler the better”."

Soft Form pastels are approx. 1 3/4″ long and 3/4″ thick

At Peters Art you will find different sets of soft form pastels. More information about the individual sets can be found here.