Girault

February 3, 2020

Hello, everyone!

How does working with color affect you? Which colours do you prefer in winter? Which ones do you like most?

It’s a great pleasure for me to think about colours and to combine them together, whether in a painting, on a palette or in some other way. For the past week I have been putting colourful pastel sticks into special sets and picking them exclusively from the Girault collection of French pastel sticks.

Yes, yes! We are creating a special set with Girault for you now!

Girault is a brand of high quality pastel, somewhere between soft and hard pastels, not as oily as some brands, but also not hard. It fits perfectly with pastel paper and has an interesting palette.

I have a selection of colours that allows me to work on very different subjects, and which is convenient for working in the studio as well as in the open air.

My ideal set of 25 crayons is already available on the Girault website. There is an extended version of 75 sticks on the Girault website as well.

I like subdued colours and naturally, for my sets I have picked mostly subdued shades that are very useful for painting. However, Girault also has a line of bright colours. These are the ones with which I first tried the Girault pastel quality about a year ago.

It was very curious to combine this pastel with other brands in one work. As always, it’s a very lively process where there is no best pastel quality but there are suitable colours and a suitable density of a pastel stick for a certain layer.

I also  want to share one observation with you that concerns the abundance of colors used. It’s great to have a lot of shades in the studio, because you never know what range of colors you will want to work with tomorrow. But when you are preparing to work on a particular subject or series, it’s a good idea to think carefully about the basic colours and limit your palette.

For each new subject I make a special selection of crayons. Colour excess can shift the focus away from the main idea. For your interest, you can count the number of colours you use in a particular picture and then drastically reduce the number of colours to the minimum required.

Good luck with your ideas. I hope you enjoy our joint sets with Girault and that your collection will be enriched by this amazing material.