Now for something a little different! This is Little Paul, a longhaired brown tabby cat. His portrait was a gift for a friend who loves in the United Kingdom. I drew it with pastel pencils on dark grey pastelmat, 12×15 inches, in March 2024. Even though most of my pet portraits are painted with acrylics on canvas, at heart I am a colored pencil person, and prefer the control and precision of a pencil versus using a brush with paint. I can get much smaller details, have much more control over where those details go, and create more subtle and natural colors. This is especially true of pastel pencils, which is my favorite media of all time. They have all the benefits of colored pencils, with the added bonus of the chalk-like texture which can make covering a large area take less time and they blend very smoothly. They layer nicely too so I can create depth and give it a more realistic appearance.

For this portrait, I primarily used Derwent pastel pencils, which generally have very natural colors in a wide variety of hues. The pastelmat paper was already dark grey, which took care of the mid tones, so I focused on building up the highlights and shadows first, then adding fur detail with a variety of different colors to achieve the right color for that area. His fur has a creamy undertone, especially in the outer fringes of the longer fur around the cheeks and on the chest. The darker tabby markings were drawn using layers of dark greys and dark browns of various hues, with the darkest black left for the end. His eyes are a green color which were also drawn with several layers to build up the proper color and add some depth. Very dark browns were used to shade the shadows in the fur around his neck. And the only white used was for the whiskers, the highlight in his eyes, and the area just around his mouth. Due to the dark color of the paper, the white areas are not truly white, but look more off-white.

This was a nice break from my acrylic paintings, and a medium that I want to work with again in the future. If not for pet portraits than for personal art, and developing my skills in a different way. Pastels are a very versatile medium, but they have the issue of being kind of messy, the pencils are a pain to sharpen, and although the pastelmat does a good job of keeping the pastels on the paper, it can still smear if the customer is not careful. Plus the customer has to buy a frame in order to display it on their wall, while the canvas is ready to hang as soon as they get it, so pastel portraits come with some hidden cost to the owners.