Pastel as a Swift Sketch Tool for Design Education and Practice: A Qualitative Review

Since the field of industrial design to a great extend concerns the creative development of threedimensional objects, project communication is often a visual matter. The activity of design drawing enables to visually suggest ideas and solutions that don’t exist yet. Drawing sharpens observation, increases perception and support visual imagination, is how art historian Buser describes it [1]. This paper will explore and discuss a specific drawing tool that seems to be suitable to utilize in various
stages of the design process, and to a wide range of functional practices and educational exercises of design drawing. This drawing technique – applying scraped pastel powder to drawings – facilitates the visual depiction of an object’s volume, and of the spaciousness of a certain scene. Besides, because of the pastel powder’s smooth effect, it is also very suitable to very lightly and gradually describe a surface with a certain curvature or shininess (reflecting the sky). Further, because of the remarkable similarities between the analogue pastel technique and the digital airbrush (e.g. in Photoshop), the pastel tool serves as a very helpful tool and technique to prepare students for the digital medium. For educational purposes, this paper will discuss the use and suitability of powdered pastel as a drawing tool, by evaluating its implementation in a range of specific drawing education exercises. These drawing exercises correspond to and represent the visualization of various design stages and subjects.