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Unison Individual Pastels
Prismacolor NuPastels
Alpha Pastels
Rembrandt Pastels
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UNISON SOFT PASTELS SETS
25% OFF |
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25% off |
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Item# 740329
Sampler Set 8
Unison's Sampler Set set gives you 8 high quality, hand rolled pastels, with a sample of the color ranges. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go. |
45.95
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34.45 |
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Starter
Colors 18
Item# 740284
Unison's Starter Colors 18 set gives you 18 high quality, hand rolled pastels, to get you started working with pastels, covering a variety of shades and colors.
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99.95
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74.95 |
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Portrait
Colors 18
Item# 740285
Unison's Portrait Colors 18 set gives you 18 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the portrait colors to start you along the way to great pastel portraits. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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99.95
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74.95 |
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Landscape
Colors 18
Item# 740287
Unison's Landscape Colors 18 set gives you 18 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the landscape colors you need to get out and start drawing or painting. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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99.95
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74.95 |
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Dark
Values #1
Item# 740321
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Unison's Dark Values #1 set gives you 18 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the dark values #1—18. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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$99.95 |
$74.95 |
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Dark
Values #2
Item# 740340
Unison's Dark Values #2 set gives you 18 high quality, hand rolled pastels, that will help you fill in the darker values. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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$99.95 |
$74.95 |
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Starter
Colors 36
Item# 740292
Unison's Starter Colors 36 set gives you 36 high quality, hand rolled pastels, get you started drawing or painting with these high quality pastels. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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195.95
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146.95 |
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Portrait
Colors 36
Item# 740286
Unison's Portrait Colors 36 set gives you 36 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the advanced portrait colors to start you along the way to great pastel portraits. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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195.95
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146.95 |
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Landscape
Colors 36
Item# 740288
Unison's Landscape Colors 36 set gives you 36 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the advanced landscape colors you need to get out and start drawing or painting. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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195.95
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146.95 |
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Unison Soft Pastel, Landscape, Set of 48
Item# 743034
IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE
Unison's Landscape Colors 48 set gives you 48 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the range of values to help you with your pastel works. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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239.95
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179.95 |
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| Unison Soft Pastel, Portrait, Set of 48
Item# 743035
IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE
Unison's Portrait Colors 48 set gives you 48 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the range of values to help you with your pastel works. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go. |
239.95
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179.95 |
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Unison Soft Pastel, Landscape, Set of 66
Item# 743032
Unison's Landscape Colors 66 set gives you 66 high quality, hand rolled pastels, with an expanded range of colors to help with your landscape drawing and painting. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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329.95
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247.45 |
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Unison Soft Pastel, Portrait, Set of 66
Item# 740333
Unison's Portrait Colors 66 set gives you 66 high quality, hand rolled pastels, covering the values needed for basic portraiture. These pastels come in a box with a foam insert and get you ready to go.
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329.95
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247.45 |
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The Unique History of Unison Pastels
A Rapture of Texture & Colour: Out of a frustration with the pastels
available, British artist, John Hersey began making handmade pastels.
Developed to be superior in colour, texture and response, Unison Soft
Pastels are unlike anything on the market today. John Hersey worked out
his unique colour formulations over a decade of experimentation, creating
intense, vibrant colours, blended almost exclusively from pure pigment
and water.
As an artist, I was at a point where I needed to work in pastels,”
Hersey says. “But the pastels I tried seemed to be utterly ridiculous.
They had no sense in them -- just infinite numbers of similar tints. Most
of them were very thin and wrapped in paper so that if there were any
cracks, the paper disguised it. Hersey had been using soft charcoals for
years, and loved the texture of the medium and the boldness of the absolute
black it offered. His work in black and white gave him a keen awareness
of light and shadow. He wanted to translate that awareness to the use
of color. But he could not find pastels that suited him in either performance
or colour.
Benefits of the Handmade Process: In pastel factories, pigments are mixed
with water, gums and other additives in large mechanical mixers. The pastel
“dough” is then pushed through the barrel of an extruder by
a long revolving screw. The solid dough is forced through a circular opening
at the extruder’s end. It emerges from the extruder like a long
pencil and is cut to stick lengths. It drops onto a conveyer belt to go
through a drying operation, then a wrapping operation.
The problem with extrusion,” Hersey says, “is that it squeezes
the pastels very tight and compresses them.” And they are probably
overheated in drying. This makes them hard, on the whole. It alters their
consistency. And alters their response to being used.
In our handmade process, the pigment hardly gets pressed at all. The
sticks are rolled lightly. It makes them very fluent when you use them.
Like soft charcoal.
Creating consistency of response across the colour spectrum was a particularly
thorny problem for Hersey. Pigments vary in their physical properties.
Many pigments will hold together after being mixed with water, rolled
and dried. Others fall to pieces. For those Hersey adds a little weak
starch or gum to give the best response without interfering with the colour.
Many of our colours are pure and single pigments,” Hersey says.
“On the whole they are blended, three or four or five different
pigments together. But we blend in very little white or chalk. Artists
are generally looking for intense and dark pastels. You can get sick of
the endless arrays of pale pastel shades. You want some really strong
colors. And those are just pigment and nothing else.”
Colour = Light + Shadow: “Light is the beauty of the world making
colour the tangible evidence of creation,” Hersey writes. “If
the sun is the true light, then in the earth also there is true colour.
But unlike the sun, the earth is subject to much coming and going. At
one time dawn. At another twilight. At one time Spring. At another Autumn.
Although the true sun remains, the colour is forever changing. Its own
true nature held between the fingers of the cool sky and the radiant sun.
Hersey brings a poet’s sensibility to his work with colour. He
has developed his 288 pastels as a series of 16 sets of 18 colours each.
The nine central sets follow Hersey’s theory of color-integration.
This theory is based on his observations of nature, in which he observes
that a single colour, from a single light source, can take on almost endless
variations. He bases his sets of colour on these variations.
Most manufacturers make up their sets of colours by the simple addition
of either black or white to the pigment mix. That practice results, Hersey
contends, in isolated series of stepped reductions or tints, having no
reference to a coloristic whole. Instead, Hersey takes colours and creates
cycles of related hues, to reflect the unison he sees in nature. Thus
the name of his company: Unison Colour.
Beyond Theory: I worked it out so that the cycles work in terms of how
your eye sees things,” Hersey says. “It's not just theoretic.
In nature, one sees centers of intense color and all the variations of
that color until it gets so weak or so influenced by something else that
it becomes another colour. Stable colour does not exist. It's an illusion
of the sun. You look out the window, you'll find that what was a beautiful
pale green is now a dark blueish green. Colour in nature is changing all
the time. These changes are what I am trying to illustrate in my color
sets. Of course it's not complete. If you are going to make pastels to
illustrate the entire universe, you're going to make millions of pastels.
Hersey found inspiration in his surroundings. He comes originally from
the south of England, which he describes as foggy and misty, with poor
light for an artist. The light in Northumberland, where he has come to
live, is particular. “It's Roman light up here,” he says.
“Very brilliant, incandescent and radiant. Like the works of Plussy
and Claude. Even if you drive south one hundred and fifty miles from here,
all the colours begin to fade. The light has been an enormous influence
for me".
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