Blue Earth Pastel Sampler Set Land and Sea
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Robert- I am really looking forward to your review of the Blue Earth pastels, you always do such a great job reviewing art supplies!
I've been considering the BE pastels lately- the layout of the pastels seems really nice. I wish that more people would buy the set and post photos here on WC! So hard to see the true colors at the Dakota website…
My favorite pastels are Ludwigs, and I'm curious how BE compares. I have the Ludwig color chart, but often have trouble finding the right hue/value, and have ordered sticks from the color chart which haven't been quite what I was looking for. The chart is on UArt paper, which is a nice paper, but it makes judging some of the colors, especially portrait colors difficult because of the yellowish background (IMO). The Ludwig color chart has many "colors", but the chart is not organized by hue/value ranges, except for their newest colors (grays and brights)- I've worked on putting together an adequate portrait set with Ludwigs, but when I look at the BE line, I see lots of possibilities…
Will be curious what you think of the BE. Right now they seem to have special pricing on their boxed sticks, and the price drops down to below $3 a stick and might be worth the cost.
One hesitation I have is that they do use cadmium- I'm not worried about my personal health, but for the environment. But I did find out the cadmium they use is sourced from Europe, not Asia, and I'm pretty sure that Europe has more stringent controls on mining. That puts me more at ease, enough that I may end up trying them after your review!
By the way, found out that Blue Earth pastels are manufactured here in the US, in Blue Earth, Minnesota! Cool!
I'm looking forward to the package with bated breath, they did seem so interesting in the way they organized the color. Thanks for the tip about the Ludwig chart. I was tempted to get the full chart in order to be able to order open stock easier, but if it's that disorganized it might be hard. Especially if it's harder to judge the color on Uart.
With the special pricing on the boxed sets, the Land-Sea and Portrait-Figure 21 color sets are tempting. It's a nice range and has some interesting hues in it. Full range saves about $200 on the cost of all of them in open stock, but involves juggling 12 boxes on a table and has many more neutrals than I'd normally use. Ever since I first saw them I've been tempted to get just the "A" line and move three cool greens over to swap out the dull darker yellow greens on the Earth Green box.
Agree it's hard to tell from the photos. When I got my Terrages the colors were much brighter than either Dakota or Blick's photos of the set and I was very happy about that since I got them as mixers and wanted full strong intensity. With what I picked out in my custom sampler, I should get strong intense colors if there are any.
They just got here! Took some pictures. Dakota used Priority Mail to ship them and so they arrived very fast. Unfortunately there was a mistake in the phone order so I got a P4A instead of the T4A that I ordered, which they're making good and shipping my turquoise stick right out.
So here's the box I just opened! The two Quinacridone Pinks are both lovely colors but one's going to move to a different box when the turquoise comes. Also I might have to either get a white or use a Sennelier white with them because that light neutral is actually about the same value as the bright yellow. Useful beige, but not a lightener for the other colors.
The box is quite tiny, I could shove it into a jacket pocket easily. That makes this a good choice for painting outdoors or in the field. If I toss it in my backpack as long as I've got something with a white in it too, I could easily combine them.
So I did swatches of all the new pastels on plain paper. I think these might like sanded papers better, they're quite soft though. I liked the Ludwig textures better.
The orange that I chose looks a bit redder than I thought it would be from the color chart, almost a warm red orange more than orange. The green is satisfyingly bright yellow green suitable for "sunlight coming through a leaf from behind." The deep dark violet is a lovely deep dark violet close to TerryLudwig V100 with a different texture.
The texture is very soft and almost a little slippery. I'll need to try it on more other sorts of paper to really know. They seem pigment rich but the darker Quinacridone Pink and the Orange crumbled a bit.
They're not hard to take out of the box. The way the ends are up does save some space in how to carry them, the entire 12 color box would fit in a jacket pocket and a white would make this sufficient to carry for plein air. But I might want to cut small pieces of sanded paper to carry or prime pages in my pastel journal to use with them.
I'll try them in my pastel journal next maybe, and see how well they work with others by lightening with a Ludwig or Sennelier. They are really quite soft yet also very smooth, in a way it was like going back to the smooth softness of student grade pastels. They blend easily and are very fine grained, there's a little variance in texture per color that must come from the pigment and suggests they're not adding extra binders to equalize texture.
Interesting pastels. I'm looking forward to getting the turquoise and now think I might have skipped the orange in favor of a white, since I really thought that light neutral was much lighter. It's darker in person than the photo shows, seems to photo lightly. It'd be a good if cool base for a skin tone, could in a stroke be a distant skin tone light, vs. the darker neutral being much less purplish than it looked in the photo, more a warm brown for dashing in darker people in the distance.
Nice Robert…looks good..but they look tiny. Are they smaller than TLs?
nice flower!
Pastels rule!!,
JakeThey do. I've got to try them on other papers and try doing something real with them – and dig out a white soft enough to use with them.
Thank you Robert for the preliminary review! Great flower!
The sticks are lovely in that box- and quite bright! They do look small, but in a set, they are on "special" right now for $2.50 or less, and open stock, look like they are $3.00. The prices seem reasonable, especially in a set on special. Terry Ludwig's price seems to have gone up- open stock sticks are now $4.15 each!
I'll be curious to know what you think of them on sanded surface. My favorites are Terry Ludwig, but I'm tempted to try the BE portrait set…
I agree with you- seems like the primary sampler should have had a lighter stick for highlights and mixing the others…
Yeah. If I really like them I might get the Land-Sea and Portrait sets, since that's a manageable number. I don't just want to do either and there aren't many warms in the Land-Sea set, but for some reason it appealed to me.
That or get the A line in all the actual colors but substitute the B line for the darkest three greens so that it's seven greens getting lighter and greener. That'd be an interesting palette and less expensive than getting the full range by a lot, but, I'd also wind up having to get it all for open stock price. I'm not sure if I like them enough to get that many, the Land and Portrait sets are cheaper per stick.
I can see one advantage to the size though. They'd fit well in a Single Sketchbox for a good palette for museum sketching or anywhere else I don't want to need an easel!
I've had some for a while, l like them better than my Ludwigs. Agree that the size is off-putting pricewise but perfect for transporting. Having the entire range of color in one box just makes me dance with joy, so for me these are definitely thumb up. No more guessing about whether that's a warm or cool stick.
"there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women"
Madeleine AlbrightMudfish- Can you elaborate why you like the Blue Earth pastels better than the Ludwigs? Do you prefer the texture, and how do they compare?
I find choosing a gradients of colors in the Ludwig line frustrating, even with a color chart (I should qualify this, the newer sticks in the Ludwig line, like the grays, blues and brights, are numbered in progression from light to dark for the same hue line, but the older sticks are numbered in such a way that they are scattered all around the chart!). And although I've put together a satisfactory box for portraits, I don't like the Ludwig line of colors as much as the Unison, Sennelier nor Rembrandt lines for what I consider skin tone colors..
The systematic color and value progressions of the BE is the most appealing thing to me. The size would be okay to because I break Ludwigs in half…
But, I do love the textures of the Ludwigs, and for some of my complaints about them, the texture, and the fact that they don't use cadmiums, are the main reasons I like them. I also like Ludwig greens, grays and dark choices, although rarely use my greens.
I am not totally against cadmium use though, if the BE have as smooth and buttery texture as Ludwig does, especially on PastelMat, I might have to try the portrait sampler…
Today I gave the Blue Earths another test – this time on sanded paper, I primed another page in my S&B Beta journal with Colourfix primer yesterday to do the Johannes Vloothuis class in pan pastels and ten didn't get going on it. Will do that later.
Decided to use it to try my Blue Earths on a real painting. One of the WDE images looked like I could do it if I used a white Ludwig with them – and by the end I didn't need the white Ludwig. If I just have that little box with me I'll be using the paper to lighten and doing a lot of blending to get values. They are very good for that.
I finally realized what was familiar-unfamiliar about them. They feel like the soft smooth silky Faber Castell or Loew Cornell or Blick Student soft student grade pastels. Super soft. Occasional crumbles. That slick silky texture. More creamy than buttery – there's a distinct feel difference between them and Ludwigs suggesting different binder formula and texture. The pigments are very rich and strong, light values blended out by smudging shade smoothly. They respond well… to … fingers.
lol I finger blended a lot and just washed up afterward. I'm not too worried about it on my hands.
Down side very, very dusty and crumbly. I had to snap off great lots of dust that was piling up from putting strokes of even fairly light consistency on. They're just different. But that size is quite convenient.
Still not sure if I want more of them, if I do, I may want to put them in with some other pastels. Next step is to go testing them as finishers over other pastels, how good are they at the "final details" use? Senneliers crumbled and got dusty like that too.
Slight variance in texture between colors does betray that these are real artist grade ones where pigments behave differently, not dyed chalk that all has the same exact feel.
I should get a photo of a Ludwig and a Blue Earth sitting next to each other.
Well, there it is! I set the Blue Earth on top of the Ludwig so you could see exactly how much smaller it is. Ludwigs are pretty compact too in a plein air box. But these little Blue Earths have a serious advantage with size and plein air, so I'm going to keep playing with them till I really master them.
I got very frustrated right to the end of my painting – and then I liked it right at the end. I'm not used to that texture any more. Even though every single time I've played with student pastels I've beat my head on the wall going "Why doesn't some manufacturer do artist grade ones with that texture? Some effects just work better in it."
They're not bad for the money. They're good and they're fun. The size is a good thing, I think they'd cost more if they were that finely milled and the size of Ludwigs. But I am beginning to think calcium carbonate may be in the filler giving that texture.
They wear down fast, the corners and edges I used blunted off very quickly. Again like Sennelier, but I was on Colourfix and grit does wear pastels down faster. The pile of dust in the photo is from the Blue Earth not the Ludwig, which I had wiped clean. What I haven't tried are soft smooth coated surfaces like La Carte or Pastelmat. I've tried plain paper sketch paper and now Colourfix. Pretty sure Wallis would eat them alive. But I'll have to see how that smoothness works on Pastelmat.
This is a fun series of experiments.
Ah, one other thought that occurred to me. It's nagged me around the edges. By the chart, the BLUE color looked like it was French Ultramarine with Cerulean as a more green cast blue. It's not. It's something else or mixed with something to green it, maybe Ultramarine Green Cast or something. Because it's somewhere between a greenish blue and a spectrum blue, it hasn't even got the slightest violet cast. The purple is a mid-to-reddish violet and fairly light, not Dioxazine Violet.
This means they may expand of course, go add Ultramarine as itself later on just as they did Turquoise. Or a Blue-Violet which would serve the purpose, the bright blue-violet sometimes seen. I prefer violet-cast blues to green cast blues generally, or to have both. If I've got one, then I'd rather have Ultramarine. It still makes bright enough greens but it does vivid violets just as quinacridones do brighter violets.
The full range would appeal to me more based on a 12 color spectrum or 13 since Turquoise is added and Cerulean neatly between Blue and Turquoise. The deep dark violet doesn't look washed out though so maybe there's dioxazine in the darkeners. They don't talk about what pigments or formulas or binders, so it's all guessing in the dark.
Yet I miss Ultramarine.
I also like ultramarine blue.I have Schmincke ones (which are not real thing fully,and now even synthetic ultramarine is real one i mean is mixture) and which dont have anything else. I somehow based hues they use some most reliable pigments based pics i mean these Blue Earths. But as i know sometimes exactly or almost exactly same hue can made otherways.
Thank you Robert for a great review, and comparing the size of the BE next to the Ludwig!
I agree with you- you might try PastelMat. I find that Sennelier creates so much dust on most papers for me- except on PastelMat. Ludwigs are similar- on other papers I get a lot of dust, but PastelMat seems to grab the soft pastels well. PastelMat is strange though- when I use softer pastels, like Ludwig, Sennelier, hardly any dust forms at the bottom of my easel. But if I use Unison (slightly firmer), more dust forms, and finally, Rembrandt on PastelMat forms a lot of dust for me. Yet on Canson Mi-Tientes, Rembrandts seem to produce less dust.
Nice review, thanks again! I may have to try the portrait set- I break the Ludwigs in half, and the BE look like they would be a good in between size.
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