Saturday 4 January 2014

The Top Five Soft Pastels in 2013

This post reviews my poll Which is your favourite make of artist grade soft pastels? which ran on my website Pastels - Resources for Artists during 2013.

Here's the chart of the results for 2013


It's the same Top 5 Pastels again - plus a tweak!

The top Five Soft Pastels, according to people who responded to the poll, were as follows.  Links to more information about the pastels are embedded in the name

  1. Unison Soft Pastels (British) - repeating the pattern of all previous polls - Unison consistently come top.  At the end of the day, pastel artists recognise very high quality products and vote with their wallets!
  2. Sennelier Extra Soft Pastels (French) One of the oldest and possibly the smallest pastels with one of the largest chromatic range of pastels - now offered in 525 shades
  3. Schminke Soft Pastels (German) - Some of the smoothest pastels in existence. As I indicate on my website I've bought this very popular pastel in four different countries on three different continents!
  4. Talens Rembrandt (Dutch) A very popular range which comes midway between soft and hard and one which many people start with - I know I did!
  5. Joint 5th place
    • Terry Ludwig (American) I always think of Terry Ludwig as being very like Unison in the sense of being an independent artisan supplier of soft pastels - who started small and has got bigger through the patronage of very many pastel artists.
    • Girault (French) 
  6. Girault got into the "top five" by virtue of Terry Ludwig having slipped slightly. 
Here you can see a table which gives the relative percentage share over the last few years - according to the poll.


BRAND OF PASTEL
2013
2011-2013

2011
2010
2006-2009
Unison
23%
18%
22.1%
21.9%
19.6%
Sennelier
17%
13%
14.7%
13.3%
15.9%
Schminke
13%
9%
6.6%
15.2%
11.7%
Talens Rembrandt
10%
8%
11.2%
9.4%
9.4%
Terry Ludwig
5%
6%
6.6%
6.1%
11.7%
Winsor & Newton
-
6%

4.7%
6%
Girault
5%
5%

5%
3.1%

As you can see the top four brands are now beginning to pull away from the rest of the pastel brands. I'm guessing this in part relates to the demise of the Winsor & Newton Pastel which can now only be obtained as discounted pastel sets.

Unison has had its best ever year and Schminke is regaining some of the ground it lost in 2011 and 2012.

Of the remainder PanPastels is growing a loyal band of followers and is doing well to achieve 3% of the vote.

Girault crept into Joint 5th place as a result of a slightly worse result by Terry Ludwig.

I've now posted a new Poll for 2014 - but will also be announcing it in a separate post tomorrow.

Past Polls about Soft Pastels


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