The difference between what you thought the painting was going to be and what you see on the canvas is Harmonious Pastel Painting. Colors that were so good individually somehow do not work together. The entire affair is greasy, or worse still, crowded. The issue is, nine out of ten times, is not skill. It’s the palette.

A muted pastel palette is successful since it eliminates the chaos prior to even picking up a brush. Colours that are similar in tone in a warm, cool, muted, whatever the mood on the day demands, fit well together. The eye not only travels through the painting without being caught on anything. That casualness that people think comes with professional work? Much of it is reduced to this.

Light pinks, light mauves, light sage, light lavender. It is not merely pretty colors. They are equally light and saturated and that is precisely the reason why they blend so beautifully. Take one to extremes–a bright cobalt in the centre of a blush-and-cream arrangement, and the entire composition struggles against itself.

The problematic aspect of this is that the majority of novices develop their palette by taking colors that they like as they come across them. Totally understandable. It is one thing to love a color independently and quite another to understand how it interacts with five other colors. Pastels are particularly inexcusable in this instance since their gentleness is their virtue. A single discordant chord, and the tenderness falls.

One convenient practice is to check the palette on scrap paper, and then to commit to canvas. Place the colors one next to another, overlap a portion of it a bit, and squint. Squinting is absurd but it actually flattens the detail and provides you with the general color relationship. When it is read as cohesive when it is blurred, it will be read as cohesive in the painting.

The consistency of temperatures is more than just a matter of most tutorials. A light palette of warm and cool without design is likely to be uncomfortable not dramatic but off. Early choose whether you are going to paint in the warm light or cool shadow, and attribute all colors decisions to it.

Four or five colors, in total, are used to construct some of the most striking pastel paintings. Holding back is not a restriction. It is what makes the work have that contemplative, pensive quality that is difficult to achieve with a busy palette. The greater number of color selections, the greater the possibility of something to go wrong.

Peace in a palette does not indicate blandness. It is still there contrast, but controlled contrast. A somewhat darker mauve on a light pink/purple, is taken as depth. And the same blush beside a saturated purple looks like an error. The contrast is a fine one but it is all.