Brown! An earth colour essential to artists – Old Masters and amateurs alike. Vandyke brown, known also as Cassel Earth, has been popular since the 17th century when it was made from soil and peat and Rubens mixed it with gold ochre to produce a warm transparent brown. Umber, an ochre, has taken its name possibly from the Latin umbrella for its capacity to make shadows. Burnt Sienna, a rich red-brown is named after the Italian town.
Pastel pencils made by major art pencil manufacturers, such as Derwent, Faber-Castell, Conté and Cretacolor come in a variety of browns. They are similar in texture to hard pastel sticks, only they are encased in wood and they produce finer lines than soft or oil pastels and make for more detailed work. Pastel pencils can be sharpened to a fine point like normal pencils and they are easier to store and keep clean than the pastel stick variety.
Brown Pastel Pencils by Derwent
Derwent produces an extensive range of art pencils, including pastel pencils. The range of browns comprises Tan, Chocolate, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Ochre, Venetian Red, and Terracotta. The Derwent Old Livery range includes Terracotta, Burnt Sienna, Chocolate, Mid Tint and Full Strength Sepia.
Cretacolor Pastels
Cretacolor’s pastel pencils are in fact the Pastell carré hard pastels encased in wood. The colours are brilliant and lightfast and like the Pastell carré they can be mixed and smudged and combined with brown and grey chalks. Brown Cretacolor pastel pencils come in Ochre, Sanguine Light, Sienna, Van Dyke Brown, Bister, Sepia Light and Olive Brown.
Conté Browns
Conté offers a range of high quality pastel pencils, perfect when more detail is required in the artwork. With a diameter of 5mm, they are a pleasure to hold and to use and come in Umber, Bistre and Red Brown. Bistre is a shade of dark gray-brown, used among other artists by Vincent Van Gogh who writes to his brother in 1884 (Van Gogh Letters website):
“you will not find the silvery tones in my work done here, but rather brown ones (bitumen for instance and bistre), which I do not doubt some people will disapprove of.”
Faber-Castell PITT Pastel Pencils
Available in 60 colours Faber-Castell PITT Pastel Pencils are offered in wide variety of browns: Van Dyke brown, Burnt Umber, Walnut Brown, Burnt Ochre, Terracotta, Brown Ochre, Raw Umber and Bistre. FC offers the hard-to-find colour Caput Mortuum, a shade of brown with a gruesome past. Caput Mortuum was made in the 18th century by ground up Egyptian mummy body parts, thus named Mommie, Mommia or Mummy Colour. Needless to say this method has been abandoned!
Faber-Castell prides itself in that its pencils contains high-quality pigments and are encased in premium cedar wood casings which prevent breakage. They are sold in tins and individually. FC also produces the Monochrome pastel range which is designed for sketching. It includes shades of sepia and sanguine.
For the history of pigments, see the excellent WebExhibits online museum Pigments through the Ages and Victoria Finlay, Colour, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002. More information on pastel pencils on the relevant websites: Faber-Castell, Cretacolor and Derwent. For art pens in shades of brown, see Art Brown Pens by Faber-Castell and Zig for Drawing and Sketching.
Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
