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Drawing with Pastel Pencils for the First Time

Myra Naito
6 min readJul 29, 2021

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Drawing with pastel pencils for the first time was nerve wracking…for about the first 10 minutes. I am now a huge fan! But my success with them wasn’t without a lot of studying (watching YouTube videos of my favorite artists using pastels). I wanted to take the plunge, but was hesitant when I’d heard of all the frustrations other artists had gone through. Thus, began the watching of YouTube videos.

First attempt. I should have added much more layers before adding fur detail. (Photo/Art Credit: Myra Naito)

Would it be enough to bypass the pitfalls AND my fear of color?

For those of you who have followed me for any period of time, you know that I’m a graphite artist and have been for the better part of 40 years. If you’re new to my work, you can see some here. Graphite is much simpler, really. White to black and all the shades in between. But with color, you can not only add white and black to it, which is simple enough, but you can also add other colors to it, from a little to a lot. Far too many variables for me!

Until now.

I tried my hand at color pencils, and I like them, but they take a bit more work. For me, the layering process was a bit painful. Painfully slow, mostly. And I also didn’t achieve much dimension, which was frustrating. I chalked it up to the learning curve of working with a new medium.

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Myra Naito
Myra Naito

Written by Myra Naito

Freelance copywriter who is passionate about art and fitness. Check out my art blog at mnatiodesigns.com/blog/ or follow me @mnaito_fineart .

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