[Laurence Finston]

I was using chalk pencils for marking a wood block for printing and had to replace a color. At the art supply store, all they had were pastel pencils from Faber-Castell, which are of better quality than what was required. "Pitt" is the name of the line.

Faber-Castell makes excellent pencils and art supplies, so it didn't suprise me that I liked the pastel pencil. I decided I would like to use them for something and bought a few more.

However, I work systematically with color and when I like a medium, I like to have the complete assortment and make color charts. With media such as watercolors or oil paints, this can run into money, so I don't actually have the complete assortment of these media from Schmincke, which is my current top choice as a manufacturer of them (yet).

I have 5 tubes of watercolors of the brand Old Holland. They are the best I've ever used. They also make oil paints. Both kinds of paint are approximately twice as expensive as the corresponding ones from Schmincke. They are museum quality and used by restorers. They are definitely on my wish list, but probably not the entire assortments.

The photos show most of the steps of creating a color chart for the pastel pencils. I'm using black charcoal paper. I will also make a chart on white or off-white charcoal paper.

I'd already made a template for drawing the 2 x 2cm squares, which saved quite a bit of time. The wooden tool is a mahl stick I made when I still had my workshop. It's made of beech, the most common and least expensive hardwood available in Germany, and finished it with linseed oil. In this context, "least expensive" means "very expensive" rather than "outrageously expensive". It is available as white beech or red beech. It is very hard and the only time I hurt myself badly enough to have to go to the emergency room when I had my workshop was when I tried to plane a plank of red beech with a hand plane. I'm fairly sure the wood for the mahl stick is white beech.

The only other commonly available hardwood, i.e., in building supply stores, is oak, which is somewhat more expensive than beech. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I'm using the term "hardwood" in the sense of deciduous rather than coniferous. Pine ("Kiefer" in German) is a hard wood, but taxonomically a softwood, whereas balsa is the softest of all the commercially sold woods, but taxonomically a hardwood. Of course, it is also "commonly available", like some other kinds of wood, but not for general purpose use.

As far as I know, the mahl sticks you can buy have cloth or wool at the end where I have the wooden ball. Some writers on art technique disapprove of the use of the mahl stick. While I agree that it's good to be able to draw without resting your hand on something, I find that it's not always realistic, especially with more technical kinds of drawing.

When looking at color samples, nearby colors interfere with our perception, so it's necessary to isolate them. For this purpose, I have two masks, one made of white Bristol board and the other of black photo board. I have plain sheets of the same materials for covering the rest of the chart.

It's also good to make large individual samples. So far, I've only done this for some of my watercolors.