Pastel sticks come in many different brands. For a year, I've mostly painted with Rembrandt and Schmincke -- both good quality brands. The Rembrandts are a rather firm pastel that work well on almost any surface -- my workhorse pastel. Schmincke's pastels are like 'whipped cream', as they are supersoft, and can give a very decent impasto effect. I've used them over the Rembrandt's, because I'm a tad heavy handed, so I've needed to not fill the tooth of the paper too quickly.

But I felt I also wanted a brand that was somewhere between those two in relative hardness, so I decided to test the UK brand Unisons and got their Dark Jewels set, and their Special set. I realy liked the pigment intensity, and them being both soft and firm enough, so I got a 72-stick set with mostly what some call chromatic colours (those of the rainbow), and while I was at it, the set of Turquoises was so delicious so it somehow jumped into the shopping basket, and took the Orange set along. :-) With some extras, this is how my Unison collection looks right now: 

 Oh, yes, a set of Lights sneaked into the order, too.

The Starter set (the large one at the back of the pic) is organized in a way that I find impressive and like a lot: In the middle, there are the most pigment-saturated sticks, with lighter version towards top and bottom.




If we take the 3rd row from the right, the greens, there is a progression from the middle upwards of lighter and cooler greens, while down-wards the progression is ligher and warmer. This is really brilliant, because when white is added to a colour, it cools, dulls, and lighten (or whiten) them, which makes even warm colours go very cool the lighter the tint is. The maker of Unisons does what I did when painting with oils -- he adds a bit of yellow to the green (either together with white or yellow only) to warm it.




Visually the progression from darker to lighter *warm* greens is way more satisfying than mere tints. The lightest and yellowest are newsprung leaves in spring sunshine, while the more saturated warm greens are summer foliage in sunlight. On the cooler side, the greens are 'dustier' and look like foliage during an overcast or cloudy day. Extremely usable system, in my opinion.

To test the new sets of Unisons, I painted a vignette of a rose, on black Canson Mi-Teintes:

 (Larger version on the website.)

The Unisons performed wonderfully. As I layer and crosshatch a lot, creating my own colour-vibrations, I was really pleased with the fact that I could add several more layers than I'd even hoped for. The different colours 'married' really well, not creating anything resembling 'mud', but only rich vibrant colour. What more can one ask for?

Now, I only really need some special Terry Ludwigs, and that beautiful Flinder's Violet from ArtSpectrum.... Plenty is never enough for most pastellists.