Soft Pastels for Children's Book Illustration, A Complete Guide to Colour, Texture and Technique

There is something deeply satisfying about picking up a soft pastel and dragging colour across paper, the immediacy of it, the warmth, the way the pigment sits on the surface like something alive. Over the course of one extraordinary month of live illustration sessions, I dedicated myself entirely to exploring soft pastels as a medium for children's book illustration from my very first nervous live session to finishing four complete illustrations and discovering exactly what my soft pastel illustration style looks and feels like. In this post I share everything I learned, the techniques, the surprises, the lightbulb moments, and the practical tips that any illustrator working in traditional media needs to know.

Why did you choose to explore soft pastels specifically for children's book illustration?

Soft pastels have a quality that very few other media can replicate an immediate, tactile warmth that feels handmade in the truest sense. When you look at a soft pastel illustration, you can feel the texture of the paper underneath the colour, the layering of pigment, the gentle blending at the edges. For children's book illustration, where warmth, playfulness, and a handcrafted quality are enormously valued by publishers and readers alike, soft pastels are a genuinely exciting medium to work with.

I had been exploring multiple traditional media as part of my ongoing commitment to developing my illustration style watercolours, inks, gouache, alcohol markers, and more and soft pastels kept calling me back. So I committed an entire month to them four live illustration sessions, four complete illustrations, and a colour key exploration to understand them deeply rather than just dabble.

What I discovered by the end of that month surprised even me. My confidence with the medium grew so significantly across just four sessions that by the final live I could clearly articulate what my soft pastel illustration style is the specific combination of techniques, marks, and approaches that feels authentically mine. That kind of clarity is rare and precious in a medium exploration, and it only comes from consistent, committed practice.

What paper and materials do you recommend for soft pastel illustration for children's books?

This is one of the most practical and important questions for any illustrator starting out with soft pastels because the paper you choose makes an enormous difference to the quality and feel of the finished illustration.

My single most important discovery from this month of exploration was this: always use proper pastel paper rather than standard sketchbook paper. Standard sketchbook paper does not have enough tooth, the slight roughness that grabs and holds the pastel pigment and the results feel flat and unsatisfying as a consequence. Proper soft pastel paper transforms the experience entirely.

Paper colour matters too. Warm coloured paper like creams, ochres, warm greys creates a naturally warm, inviting feeling in a finished illustration and works beautifully for cosy, character-driven children's book scenes. Cool coloured paper like blues, cool greys, soft greens creates a naturally cooler, more atmospheric mood and works brilliantly for mysterious, wintry, or dramatic scenes. Choosing the right paper colour before you even pick up a pastel is the first creative decision you make and it shapes everything that follows.

The materials I used across this month: ✦ Camel Artist Soft Pastels, excellent starting point, accessible and versatile ✦ Art Studio Soft Pastels ✦ Spectrum Soft Pastels ✦ Koh-I-Noor Soft Pastels ✦ 2 Brown Conte Paris Soft Pastel Pencils, brilliant for detailed line work and final touches ✦ Huion Light Pad for tracing and composition refinement ✦ Q-tips and stomps for blending ✦ Wet wipes for cleaning hands between colours

Dream brands for the future: Sennelier, Schmincke, Unison, and Diane Townsend, all exceptionally soft, rich in pigment, and beloved by professional illustrators worldwide. If you are just starting out you absolutely do not need multiple brands start with one good set and learn the medium before investing further.

What is a colour key and why is it such a useful tool for children's book illustrators?

A colour key is a small, fast, rough colour study typically no bigger than a postcard that maps out the overall colour mood of an illustration before committing to the full-scale final artwork. It is a tool borrowed from animation and film production where colour scripts and colour keys are used to plan the emotional arc of an entire film through colour alone.

For children's book illustration, colour keys are invaluable and doing them in soft pastels specifically is a revelatory experience because the medium is so fast and intuitive. You are not trying to make a finished illustration. You are asking and answering one question as quickly and honestly as possible: does this colour combination create the feeling I need for this scene?

My most important discovery from exploring colour keys with soft pastels was the power of the warm versus cool contrast. Using warm coloured paper for scenes that needed warmth and intimacy, and cool coloured paper for scenes that needed distance or atmosphere, gave me immediately richer and more emotionally resonant results than working on neutral white paper every time.

I also learned, the hard way, a critically important practical tip: scan your soft pastel colour keys BEFORE applying fixative spray. Fixative can dramatically alter the appearance of soft pastels on certain papers, lightening delicate tones, making pencil marks visible, and washing away the very qualities that made the original work beautiful. Always scan first, then fix. It is a small step that can save a lot of heartbreak.

How do you use warm and cool colours to set mood in children's book illustration?

Colour temperature, the warmth or coolness of your palette is one of the most powerful mood-setting tools available to a children's book illustrator, and soft pastels make exploring it wonderfully intuitive because the colours are immediate and tactile in a way that digital tools simply cannot replicate.

The principle is simple but endlessly variable: warm colours like reds, oranges, golden yellows, warm creams communicate comfort, safety, nostalgia, joy, and energy. Cool colours like blues, blue-greens, cool greys, lavenders communicate calm, mystery, sadness, distance, or the quiet of a winter morning.

The most interesting and emotionally complex illustrations, however, do not use all warm or all cool they use contrast. A predominantly warm illustration with a single cool element draws the eye to that element immediately. A cold, wintry scene with a single warm light source, for eg. a candle, a window glow, a fire creates instant emotional focus and a feeling of comfort within discomfort that is deeply resonant for young readers.

For my soft pastel children's book illustrations across the month, I found that the balance of warm and cool within a single piece created the most satisfying and emotionally rich results and that this principle transfers directly into my digital illustration work too. Discovering it through the physicality of soft pastels on coloured paper made it feel real and embodied in a way that learning it theoretically from a book never could.

How do you achieve fine detail and precision in soft pastel illustration?

This is one of the most common practical challenges illustrators face with soft pastels because the medium is inherently soft, blended, and atmospheric, and adding fine detail without losing that quality requires a slightly different approach than most people expect.

My solution, and one of the genuine lightbulb moments of my month of exploration, was using red and brown soft pastel pencils for final touches and line art. Pastel pencils give you the precision of a drawing pencil with the warmth and blending quality of a soft pastel. Using red and brown rather than black for line work keeps the final illustration feeling warm and handmade rather than hard and graphic, and the difference in the finished quality is significant.

This discovery also had an immediate knock-on effect on my digital illustration work. Using warm coloured line art rather than pure black outlines is something I would never have dared try digitally without first experiencing how beautifully it works in a traditional medium. The best discoveries in traditional media often transfer directly into digital practice and this was a perfect example.

For the sharpest details, the edges of broken pastel sticks are your best friend. Soft pastels in square stick form naturally break into smaller pieces with sharp edges these are invaluable for fine marks and small details without needing a separate tool.

What were the four illustrations you created during your soft pastel month and what did each one teach you?

Each of the four illustrations I completed during this month of soft pastel exploration taught me something distinct and together they trace a clear arc from first tentative experiments to confident, stylistically assured illustration.

Fishing Journey, 1st May. My first soft pastel illustration in this focused exploration series. The approach was deliberately painterly, building up layers of colour and blending broadly to create atmosphere and mood. The primary lesson here was patience: soft pastels look flat and unpromising in the early stages, and the temptation to give up before the depth develops is real. The lesson? Trust the process and keep layering.

Spring Little Me, 8th May. The second illustration pushed into more graphic territory, combining flat colour areas with painterly passages and deliberate line work. A warmer, more playful illustration that began to feel closer to my own illustrative voice.

Colour Key Exploration, 15th May. Rather than a finished illustration, this session was devoted entirely to colour key studies, small, fast, exploratory colour thumbnails testing different palette combinations for the same scene. The most technically instructive session of the month, and the one that most directly informed my colour thinking across all subsequent work.

Adventure Bunnies, 22nd May. The final illustration of the month and by far the most confident and stylistically complete. By this point four weeks of daily engagement with the medium had built a genuine fluency, and the illustration felt most like me as a children's book illustrator, precise where it needed to be, atmospheric where the scene called for it, and warm and playful throughout. Consistency is the key to growth, and experimenting more can lead you to your style. This final illustration proved that completely.

As a children's book illustrator working in traditional media, what do soft pastels offer that digital illustration cannot?

This is a question I think about a lot because I work in both traditional and digital media and believe deeply in the value of both.

What soft pastels offer that digital illustration genuinely cannot replicate is the quality of happy accidents and physical presence. When pastel pigment catches unexpectedly on the tooth of a paper, creating a texture you did not plan but that is exactly right that cannot be programmed into a digital brush. When warm and cool colours blend at their edges into a third, unplanned tone that is more beautiful than either colour alone, that is the magic of physical media!

For publishers and art directors looking for children's book illustration with genuine warmth, handmade texture, and a distinctive physical quality, soft pastel illustration offers something that stands apart from digital work. It has the quality of an object made by human hands, and children and adults respond to that warmth instinctively.

My own practice combines the best of both worlds, beginning with traditional media to capture that physical warmth and texture, then using digital tools for refinement, colour adjustment, and reproduction-ready finishing. The result is illustration that has the soul of traditional media with the technical consistency that publishers require.

If you are a publisher, editor, or author looking for children's book illustration with genuine warmth, texture, and a handmade quality — please visit gunjabhatt.com or get in touch via Amy Milligan at Illo Agency.

View Traditional Illustrations by Gunja Bhatt