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I decided to try another bird painting and chose a photo of a couple of parrots. I used my preferred paper, Clairefontaine Pastelmat,and my usual range of pencils, Faber Castell Polychromos, Caran D'Ache Luminance and Pablos, plus some Holbein and a few others. I struggled with feather details and am not entirely happy with the result, and think I should stick with animals! The painting is in the Bird Gallery, but this is it.

I finished the drawing of the dog on this paper. So Who Has My Bone? Thanks again go to Maddin_1983-7205842, of Pixaaby for the image My final thoughts about using it with coloured pencils are mixed. I tried pastel pencils and it's extremely good, which is great since that is what it was designed for! I found while doing this drawing that it performs quite well with soft coloured pencils, such as Caran D'Ache Luminance, Holbein, and various Derwent pencils, but wasn't so good with the harder brands such as Faber-Castell Polychromos and Pablos pencils. The harder pencils didn't lay down as well as the softer ones and it took a lot of work to get the paper covered. Pastelmat works well with all the pencil brands I've used, soft and hard,including Verithin too, probably the hardest of all. On balance I think I prefer Pastelmat, and will have to accept the surface artifacts that seem to have appeared over time.

Information. Canson Mi-Teintes Velvet paper is available in rolls, sheets and pads. The rolls  are available in golden beige or graphite grey and are 15m x 5m in size. The sheets  are available in 14 shades covering a good range of colours, I would like to see a slightly brighter green and a pale blue in the collection, otherwise the colour range is very good. The sheets come in 50 x 65 cm sizes, roughly 19.7 x 25.6 inches, so are a decent size. The pads are available in two sizes, 24 x 32 cm/ 9.4 x 12.6 inches, and 32 x 41 cm, 12.6 / 16.1 inches. Bothe useful sizes, certainly for portrait work.   Prices vary depending on retailers and the country.   colours First impressions. The photo I used was from Pixabay, thanks to Maddin_1983-7205842, A very cute image of a dog with a baby soother in his mouth. I cropped the image, and as the paper is a cream colour decided to change the colour of the soother. I worked for a tad over three hours on it and this is the result so far, it’s just a quick snap with my iPhone I have to say that, so far, I am very impressed with this paper and the way it handles coloured pencils. There is some dust, as with Pastelmat, but less so. The initial noticeable difference was the smoothness of the paper compared to Pastelmat, and velvet describes it well. The surface is very even with no marks or artifacts anywhere on the sheet. It takes plenty of layers and colour rendition and laydown is very good. Working on the eyes, the fine details were easy to draw, much better than Pastelmat. Another thing I noticed straight away was, so far, it doesn’t smudge like Pastelmat does either. I find Pastelmat a nightmare for that. The image on the left shows a piece of Pastelmat with a triangle of Canson paper on top, from top to bottom there is one layer, 2 layers and 3 layers, with a Caran D’Ache Pablo pencil.  The Pastelmat with three layers is quite dark, whereas The Canson is much lighter, which means it should hold more layers before the tooth is filled.     I then used a Mono eraser to see how much colour I could lift from the three layer spots on both papers. The image on the left shows the results. It worked really well on the Canson paper, lifting all but the faintest amount of colour. A very big plus. As you can see Pastelmat wasn’t very successful at all, and very messy.        I then edit the images of the papers by adding high contrast to highight the surface texture. Ignore the colours,just compre surfaces. The Canson on the left looks quite even but the Pastemat looks uneven by comparison.                       When the dog portrait is finished I'll add it to the Dog Portrait gallery.

I recently purchased a pad of this new paper from Canson. Pastel artists seem to like it a lot, and many prefer it to Clairefontaine's Pastelmat. I've been usng Pastelmat for several years and it's a superb paper for coloured pencils, ideal in that it is possible to add light colours on top of dark colours,making it great for the addition of white whiskers on animals, rather than using other methods. However, Pastelmat quality has deteriorated over the last year and the surface is often uneven, has lines, marks etc, so I am going to try a dog portrait with this paper and see how it compares. I'll post my thoughts on it soon.