I, perhaps unwisely, purchased a french easel for plein air painting for the workshop back in March. French easels are not particularly well suited for pastel transport, and particularly not for Pan Pastels, but that’s another story (turns out pans are best transported in their plastic trays–I just carry them in my backpack). I determined to make it work. With some research, I came up with a solution.
My little studio is set up in my storage room at the back of my garage. I am learning that I must work on the easel if I am to save my shoulder and neck, even though most of the time I would prefer to simply hold the support in one hand so that I could turn it to put marks on in different directions. It is necessary to turn from my easel back to my table repeatedly to choose pastels, so I decided to simply store my stick pastels in the easel itself, in the top drawer. In order to make sure the pastels are secure and won’t shatter or tumble as the easel is moved or carried, they must be protected and padded. Below, you will see how I chose to accomplish this. I will be creating a similar box for the soft sticks as well.
Materials you will need:
- Foam core board
- Knife for cutting foam core
- Packing tape
- Duct tape
- Pillow form
- hot glue and hot glue gun
- cardboard
- drawer lining
I carefully measured the space I knew I would need for the hard pastels and double checked that the space I intended to put them would contain them: it’s important that there be little or no room for the pastels to shift during transport. This also allowed me to create the insert box the exact size needed. I purchased a large pillow form (very cheap) at the local big box store. The material is easily separated into layers of just the thickness needed, and trimmed to a size slightly smaller than the lid to fit tightly down on the pastels and prevent tumbling and shifting during transport. The rest is self-explanatory from the photos, I think, but if not, please let me know.
