24 iridescent color

Sennelier is a company formed in France in the late 1800’s during the dawn of the Impressionist era to meet the color needs of artists such as Picasso, Cézanne and Monet. This breakthrough in color accomplished by the Impressionists came from a palette of colors created by Gustave Sennelier, a devoted chemist and founder of the company which bears his name. The making of Sennelier’s pastels ‘à l’écu’ actually began in 1901 when Degas asked Gustave Sennelier to create more colors to make up for the lack of hues in his current palette range. At this request and coupled with his many breakthroughs in manufacturing oils and watercolor, Sennelier developed a line of soft pastels which in turn created a wider range of colors than had ever been seen before. Today, Sennelier soft pastels are available in a range of 525 hues. The Sennelier extra soft pastel is a high quality pure pigment pastel finely ground with a binder (water with gum). The smooth, creamy and velvety aspect of these soft pastels is the result of a perfect balance between binder and pigment. For gradient hues, increasing amounts of mineral touches are added, ultimately landing towards tainted white. In addition, the manufacturing process of the Sennelier cylindrical pastel does not compress the paste and the pastel dries naturally in the open air. This leads to its unique handling quality and gives Sennelier’s pastels their unique luminosity.