Pastel colors

Pastel colors have remained popular over the centuries. Pastel colors date back to the 16th century, when they were used by Italian and German artists. But also in the 20th century popular TV-series “Miami Vice” pastel colors were the trademark of the main character Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson). What are pastels and what makes them so special?

How pastel colors are made

The name pastel color originates from the pastel stick. This art medium consists of a pure, powdered pigment with a neutral colored (white) binder, often chalk or gypsum. Meanwhile there are a large number of variants on the market with other binding material, including eg. oil pastels, hard pastels and pastel crayons.

Soft Pastels (Bleiswijck Holland)

There’s a significant distinction between the painters’ material pastel stick versus the color pastel. While it is quite possible to make bright and strong colors with pastel sticks, when we talk about pastel colors we specifically soft and light tints.

To make things even more confusing, also an artwork produced with pastels is called a pastel!

The ability of these pastel sticks to make very light tints of one pure color pigments, has yielded the name pastel colors.

Properties of pastel colors

As I mentioned already, pastel colors contain pure pigments, which results in very pure color. Light and pure neutral gray is sometimes included, but gray blue, gray green and the like are not considered ‘true’ pastels.

Looking at the different color systems, pastels have some characteristic parameters (values):

HSB/HSV: High Value (Brightness) in combination with low Saturation
HSL: High Saturation in combination with high Lightness
Munsell: High Value (8-9) in combination with high Chroma

Some example of HEX-code of pastel colors; all three values for R, G and B are relatively high:

RGB (hex): #fea3aa, #f8b88b, #faf884, #baed91, #b2cefe, #f2a2e8

Some well known pastels have specific names: Pink, mauve, and baby blue, as well as magic mint, peach, periwinkle, and lavender. (source: wikipedia-en).

Since all pastel colors are very bright, they lack the dramatic light versus dark contrast. Pastel art works therefor often seem soft, romantic and sweet.