Jack Richeson Pastel Sticks Review

I don't think I've said a whole lot about the Jack Richeson pastel sticks that I recently bought. That's because I really haven't had time to adequately test them.

Actually, I still haven't given them a real test but I did paint this tomato primarily with them. The support is a scrap of charcoal/pastel paper and it was a soft taupe color. You can see that, in spite of several layers (fixing between the layers), the background color still shows through the white.

The colors went on ok, I guess. I don't know exactly how they're supposed to go on. They don't behave either like the pencils or the semi-soft pastels (Rembrandt) I have. The colors seem a little translucent, even the darker colors, which surprised me. They're billed as being very high quality pigment rich and more lightfast than NuPastels.

I'll have to determine their lightfastness later but I do want to discuss the colors in the set I received. I bought the 30 color set and the picture in the catalog showed a pretty good variety of colors. There is a good variety but I was very surprised at the colors I received. For one thing, there isn't a true green even though there are several greenish shades in the set. I had to do some optical mixing and still didn't achieve the colors I wanted.

Anyway, I want to do some more with them before I judge them. So many times I start out not liking a certain art supply then end up with it being my very favorite! I did find the sticks a little awkward and since I really don't like pastel on my hands, the fact that they aren't wrapped was a little off-putting. Also, I have rather large hands and found the sticks kind of clumsy trying to get into the small spaces. I think once the sticks are worn into different shapes I'll be able to use them better. A little experience with them wouldn't hurt either!