Recently Robert Sloan visited these Conte Crayons pages and wrote to me with some tips of his own, which he said I could share with everyone, which I am very glad to do:

1) I don't sharpen Conte crayons because the corners of the square sticks give sharp lines and small details as easily as if they're sharpened. I wear down the tip into a chisel shape and then use the corners for details. With eight corners on a stick, or even a piece of a stick, I don't run out of sharp corners.

2) For keeping clean while drawing with Conte, I usually have a towel that I dampen on one end and keep dry on the other. This lets me wipe my fingers between colors, dry them on the dry end and keep drawing without getting up.

3) Alternately, I keep a container of cheap baby wipes handy to clean off my hands while painting. That works just as well. Homemade ones can be created from rags, especially cut up soft old sheets or worn cloth diapers soaked in a solution of dish soap and water in a plastic tub. Just toss the used rag into a second container so they all go in the laundry afterward.

4) I learned from my pastel teacher that blending colors with a stick can produce more luminous, vibrant results than using a blender or my finger. Finger blending mutes and softens an area, stick blending gives it pizazz. I'll use both in the same picture when I'm trying to emphasize the focal area with stick blending and soften background areas with finger blending so they don't compete with the focal subject. Alternating the colors I'm mixing helps a lot with getting mixtures to exactly the right hue - if I want a pale yellow and just have yellow and white, I may have to use two layers of yellow and four of white to get exactly the right value, but I can shade that area easily from pure yellow to pure white by reserving the pure white spot.

Visit Robert Sloan's Website at http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com.