How This 300-Year-Old Pastel Stick Maker Creates Nearly 2,000 Colors — More Than Its Competitors

in their liquid form pastels look just like [Music] paint but Margaret's goal is to drain the moisture turning this bright blue blob into some of the most renowned pastel sticks on the market L pastel founded by Andre Ro has been making them the same way for 300 years these drawers store hundred hundreds upon hundreds of colors with only slight variations Between Shades some only a trained eye can see but a premium pastel business is hard to sustain pastels aren't as popular as other Fine Art mediums like oil paint so for years the business struggled to

find and keep its customer base today its two co-owners work tirelessly to keep this centuries old tradition alive without sacrificing the quality the m is known for so how is this Niche art business Still Standing Isabelle Ros a relative of HRI Roch and Margaret Zer are the company's only two employees they make new pastel sticks a lot like the old ones starting with pigment and a binder based on a secret formula that took L and his son decades to develop people like Whistler Ron DGA sisly who all had issues with the medium they were having

problems with the powder sticking to the paper they were having a mold on their works so H rosi brought all of his scientific skills to try and remedy and bring them the product that they were looking for so the base of this new color is um Cerulean blue which is a very classic pigment this new color Caribbean Blue will join more than 1,900 others the Meson offers it's the biggest selection in the company's history maybe even the biggest selection of pastels ever so adding new colors to the mix takes a Discerning Eye and skilled hands

that's where Margaret comes in she's the creative force behind the business the sun's out and we don't feel like working we don't work or if the sun's out and it inspires us to make a beautiful color we do that after the initial color is set Isabelle and Margaret divide it into nine gradations from dark to light so artists can find the exact shade they need so I'm I'm essentially aiming to go between those two so we have 1 2 3 4 this will be number five 6 7 8 9 Margaret I started with one and

A2 spoons of the dark I think I'm going to be making masses already throughout its centuries long history the msant was renowned for its unmatched range of colors this is especially important for pastel artists who can't just mix two pastels together to make a new color before putting it to paper you can't blend pastel on a palette like a painter might but if you really want to make a line of a color you need to have a stick of that color that blending needs to happen at the very beginning of a pastel life instead I'm

actually not far from where I want to be which is really magical I'm going to mix it I really mix it in before I compare so I'm actually right now a bit a bit darker than I want to be so I'm going to add a bit of white if the paste is too stiff you can't integrate the White and the color very easily but by bringing it to a sort of cake batter consistency they merge quite well when they satisfied with the color Isabelle Scoops the mixture onto a terracotta roof tile to dry we use

the tiles because that's how my it was done in the past but the advantage of the tiles is they're porous the tiles absorb a bunch of the moisture creating less work for Margaret when she will put the mixture through their antique press [Music] after the paste has adequately dried Margaret wraps it in a cloth and uses an antique press to gradually squeeze the moisture from the paste this is a tool that was there when Isabelle took over the misle I would imagine it's been used for for quite a long time yeah essent the a lot

of what we surrounded with are are tools and drawers that date back 150 years and it it's as well it gives us this sense of of am in French uh I'm not sure how you say that in English uh a spirit a soul Margaret joined Isabelle at the Meson in 2010 after a visit to the shop she sent a cold email inquiring about a summer job and ended up finding her calling I would would have been happy just cleaning the shop so I didn't expect an invitation come to the house and make The Pastels with

her the way I see it is I I allowed the business to survive um and today I'm giving Margaret a sort of structure within which she can really make the craft live and by the end of this probably end up with something more consistent with modeling clay cookie dough this is one of those points in the process though where you know you might want to just sort of muscle it but you actually have to be quite attentive there's certain colors that lose water quite quickly that you can easily overpress and it's always more complicated adding

water back that's better you this okay I'm coming over with the paste [Music] hand rolling each pastel allows them to add more pigment to the mix than if they used a machine we tolerate certain consistencies that machines can't tolerate we end up with colors that are either more vibrant or deeper or or more concentrated to me it's always been the phase of the making that I prefer see it's sort of the moment when you're actually forming them so you're starting to see it happening and becoming a a pastel you when you don't know how to

roll them you can end up with pancakes the first pastels I made I made just didn't look like anything they they were all weird shapes and they were flat they had holes in them [Music] the cutting with the large R I believe that was also um the invention of an gche to the traditional process because I think in the past they used to cut the sticks um so were dry which took forever so it's cutting the ends at one in one Fell [Music] Swoop when Isabelle took over the company for her aging ants and 2000

she held on to many of the tools and techniques that R developed in his day and then we let them um hair try usually for about 3 weeks kind of all the season depends on the colors but there is also plenty about the languishing business that needed to change when she took took over the msant had next to no inventory and hardly any customers to sell it to my great aunts were in their 80s when I took over which means that for the last 20 years they hadn't made much they were very secretive so they

hadn't tried to generate new customers so essentially their customer base as the artists had grown older and died they hadn't been replaced so she spent her first two years regenerating Supply i' managed to reconstitute about 250 or 300 colors before focusing on demand the M Sal serves what's known as a niche market imagine the market as a pie while a mass Market company like Crayola tries to carve the biggest slice by appealing to as many people as possible businesses serving Niche markets cut smaller specialty slices that appeal to a specific type of customer a huge

reason for roch's Success was how he collaborated with artists to create the colors they needed and Isabelle was determined to do the same the the most difficult thing for me was that I had no art background at all I had no artistic background either I didn't draw I didn't paint so when I was talking to the artists I felt I was talking a different language one of these artists is Cloud B alad I've known her since the day I took over I think that the first color I made was a blue andigo and indigo blue

uh that she'd been waiting for for 2 years did she tell you that she was creating colors for me yeah yes they did that makes me very proud for sure that means that they like what I can do with their colors for sure they serve me I serve them it's a ex as in life Cloe picked up pastels later in her career after spending most of it working with oil paints I bought the pastel very slowly in the beginning and I discovered that I sold much more with pastel RI because the work became much better

because the quality of ban nuts was wonderful historically pastels have taken a back seat to more popular mediums like oil paints you have waves of it being used extensively and then it it goes back into being a secondary medium that people only use you know to to do basic drawings and Etc we are aware that you know it comes and goes and and at at the moment we feel that a few artists are really picking up the technique and doing really serious ious things with the with it not just prepatory drawings I walked into this

thinking there are just maybe a handful or maybe 10 artists in France that really need The Pastels if I can multiply that by the number of countries around the world I should be able to make a living out of it Isabelle inherited an archive of century old pigment some of which is still usable [Music] sometimes Margaret can even reach into the company's past to make new pastel colors that's Beauty it's a really beautiful loer actually that's actually I'm processing this in real time that I really like this pigment this is a genuine Discovery well I

kind of want to see what what kind pastel this makes I imagine because it's a an ochre it will make an agreeable texture I want to compare this to ochres that we already have in the range to see if I'd actually kind of you mind if I go get a piece of paper and bit of white sure while much of the process Remains the Same as when Ros ran things what Isabelle and Margaret really hold on to is how he thought about the business what really makes you know our pastels what what they are as

his formulas and how they marri to the craftsmanship of the Artisan that he [Music] met I know that Margaret has in her head several other ranges that she wants to bring in um and on paper she already knows that one day we will go above 2,000 but essentially as long as we keep having people coming to the shop asking for colors they don't have we're going to be bringing in new things [Music]