What's the Best Colour of Pastel Paper?

Choosing the right colour of pastel paper is really important and can cause a painting to fail. Different colours of pastelmat causes your pastel pencils to show up differently, which can be problematic, or, really great. Learning to choose the right colour of pastelmat will allow you to improve your work and get the most out of your pencils! 

What's the Best Pastelmat Colour to Use?

The best colour of Pastelmat to use, as a general sense, is Sand (in my opinion!). Sand works for pretty much any pastel pencil drawing I want to do and allows all of my colours and values to show up well. It's a good general option if you have no idea where to begin!

The second colour I would suggest is light blue. The light blue Pastelmat isn't very saturated (colourful) and more like a soft bluey/grey. Just like sand Pastelmat it allows your pencils to show up well across the board from black to white and blue to pink. 

How to Know Which Pastelmat Colour to Use

Figuring out which colour of pastel paper to use starts with making small palettes. These are really useful and allow you to see the spectrum of different colours. I would suggest you make these yourself, however, I do also have some available to download if you haven't got a big range of paper colours to test. 

You want to consider what information is most important in your reference photo. Is it the punch of some very saturated colours? Then check those colours show up really well on your chosen paper! Some colours have a poor range on certain paper colours, for example, light yellows can be very weak on dark paper because they can't cover the tooth very well.

Equally, light greys can look very dark on white paper and you 'lose' this range in your pencils as all of your light values show up darker than on other papers. I like dark papers for creating really smokey shadows that feel deep and velvety, but I have to be aware that my range of browns almost disappear into these paper colours!

Download the free pastel palettes here. 

Different Colours of Pastelmat

Pastelmat, and other pastel papers, come in a range of values and colours. I often use their Sand and Light Blue, but other favourites of mine are the grey, brown and the dark blue. I find the white a little challenging as I don't usually create backgrounds and your light pencils look very dark! Going for a mid to light-midtone is a nice option because you get a good contrast over all of your pencils.