Sennelier- get used to it….

but seriously- it is indeed enough to make grown men and women weep…. I have not only crushed a great deal of pastels in drawers that I found out too late were slightly too small… but have dropped a small fortune on the cement floor…but the worst to date was a brand new just opened box of unisons… sitting on my desk… my cat leaped on top and knocked the entire box off – of course it was open- and I found pastel dust and crumbs for weeks afterwards…

well good luck in reassembly…

Hi:

Also, sometimes pastel sticks are just plain crumbly. Since I mixed up some of my own gum tragacanth solution, and I had some way crumbled Diane Townsend pastels that I had already tried to reconstitute with plain distilled water already and they were still too crumbly, so I gave it another go, and I added a few drops of a weakened solution to try to get it to hold together better, and that seems to have done the trick. Karl Kelly mentioned he uses methyl cellulose to make Mount Vision pastels, so you could try that if you wanted to instead of the gum t. Hope this helps, too.

Hi:

If some of your pastels are too hard, I read something when about making pastels that the binder solution may not have been diluted enough, or adding a bit of Champagne Chalk might help it be a bit softer. The first time I dabbled with making pastels a few years ago, some of them were really way too rock hard and scratchy when dried, so last year, after I’d read more from other people, when I mixed up my pigments and added in a bit of Champagne chalk to all (it is supposed to not alter the color of the pigment), and that helped to make the pastels very usable when they dried. I got that at Sinopia and it really works great. Probably if you’re trying to do a single pastel stick which probably is about 1 tablespoon of material, you could add like 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of C. chalk to see if that would help its consistency after it dries. Hope this helps and at least gives you some ideas.