Make Sure You do this after painting!

'Dreams of Summers Past'                 9x12                 pastel                     ©Karen Margulis
available $225

They will stay clean! That is my commitment. I spent hours cleaning and organizing my pastels and it is such a pleasure to be greeted by a box of colors I can actually see. 

Click to See the video in case you missed it!  

But now I want to be sure they stay clean. Sure I can wipe them as I paint which is what I try to do. But inevitably they get filthy! It gets so bad that I can't tell what color or value some of them are.

Not any more!  I got a great tip from a fellow artist who used the same cornmeal method to clean her pastels but she takes it a step further. She keeps a bowl of cornmeal in her studio (tightly sealed to deter critters) After each painting or every few paintings with the same palette she puts the pastels she used into the bowl and swished them around until they are clean. THEN she puts them back into her studio box. Brilliant! Thank you!

I took her advice and cleaned my working palette after a few paintings. They were then ready to go back into the big box ready for the next painting session!  I love this idea!

Dirty pastels after using them for a couple of paintings 

Throw them into a bowl of cornmeal, gently toss them.

And voila.....clean pastels!