Shannon

Thanks for the commendations about my art. It has been a long journey. If you are new to my story, it goes way back to childhood yet I make no claims to professionalism, although I have sold some works; photography, oil paintings and hand sketched pastels aside from a few publications and awards. That is not of course why I am doing this astronomy art. I am still new to the serious sketching from observational astronomy. You can see much of the story in markseibold.com [Top icon in site 'About me'. I explain how I got to Cloudy Nights thanks to seeing Erika Rix's art in Spaceweather.com one day in October 2006.]

I will admit this. I strive for realism and accuracy but I always intend to add something to increase aesthetics. That is not to say, however, that I would embellish for the sake of impact but I try to investigate the most desirable techniques and methods of the application of any given media to impart the most in image.

In the case of pastels which I use exclusively for all of my astronomy sketching, I agree with you. The simple colored pencils are too shallow in their impartment of pigment to the surface [of pastel paper.] I use the pastel pencils to rough in essential guide line images but then do final color fills with soft [and more expensive] dry pastel chalk sticks.
The pencils have raised much controversy with discussions here. Many people feel foreign to the use of colored pencils for many personal reasons. One of which you mentioned; the weak color. You might try the soft and heavy pigmented pastel chalk sticks. There are many differing brands and I regret to mention this; although I use the affordable ones, some of the better round chalks wrapped in paper from Holland, Germany and France can run as high as several dollars and up to $6 or more per single stick. It is the 'you get what you pay for' scenario. The finer brands of higher quality contain more expensive binding agents and more pigment. They are every bit as good as the finest oil paints and if you are serious about fine sketching, then your art is worth it!

Check out what ever large art materials store that you may have in your region and talk to the workers there. Many art supply store employees are serious artists with much information to help you chose your art supplies [and fine pastels and pastel paper.]

I almost forgot blending stumps as you mentioned them. I too never used them. I also never used my fingers to blend yet for some that is OK if it works for them. It is just that bare skin will impart natural oils from the hands that can stain the paper and repel future application of chalk to the paper. I prefer to use cotton swabs, Q-tips and paper towels. I did recently purchase a couple blending stumps but still prefer use of my older standard blending methods as they cover larger areas that I tend to work with, where the blending stumps are better applied to smaller work areas with their fine point tips. I meant to add something about blending, so I edited here today > This was an example of extreme use of blending with cotton swabs and Q-Tips, then more dark shadows of the artists hands were added with dark chalk (It was published for the 1st day of Spring in Spaceweather.com 2007.) Blending can be thought of as like a dry painting technique or mixing of colors on the canvas. >
http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=14342&size=big&password=&sort=2&thecat=500

Hope this helps,

Best regards,

Mark