What other things do you need?    These accessories will benefit you with your painting. The can on the left is the fixative. There are various makes and all of them do the same job. There is another kind of spray which comes in a small jar and has a metal pipe with it. You insert the pipe into the liquid and angle it towards the painting and blow. Instead of an aerosol can, you become the aerosol.

In the middle are the touchons. They are made from tightly bound rolled paper and are sharpened to a point. They are great for tidying up lines, for eg: doorways and windows. You can just sharpen them back to a point once it has become blunt. You can also get something called a shaper. It has a shaped rubber end and this also is used for moving the pastel and for doing the same thing as the touchon.

The putty rubber is invaluable for lifting off pastel and pulling out lines. You can pull pieces off the main rubber and twist the putty into a point. They are kneadable. If you pull off a section and keep kneading it, it becomes sticky and then easily pulls up the pastel, just re-knead it and you can use the piece for as long as it stays tacky.

Here's an example of using the putty rubber and touchon. On the left the putty rubber was kneaded into a fine point and a line was lifted out. You need to go over the line a few times as the pastel quickly sticks to the rubber. If you use the rubber as more of a ball you can see you can dab out shapes next to the line. To the right of the picture, white pastel has been marked over the top of the grey. But this needs to be a rectangle. This is where you can use your touchon/shaper to make the edges sharper. If you look at the picture on the right, where the touchon was used there is now a defined rectangle.

You can get rubber ended shapers and fan brushes to assist you, the shapers just really do the same job as the touchons. They move pastel around the paper and allow you to define lines. The brush will just help to blend areas, but you can always use your finer or if it's in a small confined space, an old small paintbrush works too. Before I had touchons, I took some normal copy paper and rolled it up as tight as I could manage to get a point on it. This worked for a time. Cotton buds tend to pull too much pastel off. If you don't have a shaper and wanted the same kind of idea, I think if you wrapped some sellotape around the end of a cotton bud, it might live up to a shaper.

This is a great tool to use and it's with lots of thanks to John Knight that I have one as he told us how to make one. This really helps with large paintings for hard to reach areas without smudging their surrounds. Place the foam ball outside the area of the picture, and hold the rod in your opposite drawing hand, then rest on it while you draw.

I'm not sure if you can find them in the shops, but if not, you just get a foam ball (probably available in craft stores/art shops) and a piece of dowel (craft shop/diy). Make a slight point in one end so that you can press it into the foam ball. Apply some glue to it and push it in until it's sturdy, let it dry and you have a useful tool.

For blending large areas, fingers are the best tool. Hey! It's fun to get messy once in a while.

I should mention that it's advisable to have some wet wipes and tissues handy. The pastels are very messy and your fingers will get dirty quickly. Not wanting to transfer the colour to another part of the painting, it's better to frequently wipe your fingers with the wet wipes. The tissues are just for your use. By the way if you answer the door in the middle of your painting, check your nose and cheeks, for those smudges get everywhere!

How should we use pastels safely?    Pastels are very dusty and with each stroke some of the pastel dust will come off. If you are working on an easel, the pastel dust will drop down as you work. You can put an old towel, or some newspaper under the easel, then when you are done, just shake it outside or dispose of it. If you are working flat, again, just have some newspaper or an old towel under your board and once in a while hold the board so that the painting is tilted towards the surface of the towel or the paper and tap the back of the board to knock off the loose pastel. Again, dispose of it or collect it on a piece of old paper.

You could also use a small hand held vacuum cleaner to suck off the dust. Don't use one that states it's for a keyboard as it will quickly become to clogged up and not work properly.

If you'd like to try collecting the dust to reuse, you can just put a sheet of plain paper tucked under the bottom of your board (if you're using an easel), or if you're working flat, tilt the board and tap the pastel onto some paper so that you can save the dust for later use. I store my dust in old jam jars. You can store the dust in colours if you are very fastidious and tap it after every colour change. I tend to just keep working using various colours and save the pastels in a yellowish range and a reddish range, including the browns and blues and greens etc. I just decide if the overall remains are reddish or yellowish. It's up to you how you save them. I'm going to see if I can manage to make a variegated stick. I'll let you know how it comes out,

Whatever you do, don't blow the dust away. There's more dust there than you think. It will come up in a cloud and you may well inhale some of it. It will also blow over your painting and those light areas won't be happy with it.

If you are worried about breathing in the dust, you could wear a mask. You can buy special ones for painting jobs. Airbrush artists wear them and do-it-yourselfers for home decorating and sanding. I expect they are available from art shops, craft shops and DIY stores.

Some people are worried about the pigments being poisonous. I don't really think they are any more. I use my fingers, but as I've said keep wet wipes handy. If you feel worried about this, or don't like to have dirty hands, you can use lightweight surgical gloves to work with.

If you don't like to blend the pastels with your fingers, you can perhaps use a small piece of kitchen sponge to do the job, but this might be quite wasteful. You could perhaps find some other household utensil to use.

When you use fixative, remember to open your windows. It's not good to breathe it in.

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