SOFT PASTEL
COLOR STUDIO
Version 1.0A Colour Studio for Soft Pastel Artists
What it is
Soft Pastel Color Studio is a free app that brings together the color ranges of 23 of the best-known soft pastel brands in the world — 7,826 colors in all — and allows you to compare them with one another.
It shows which colors each brand makes, where those colors overlap, and how close or how far apart they are.
It is a way of seeing thousands of pastel colors in one place and working with them: finding a color from a photograph or a painting, looking for the same or a similar stick in another brand, building a palette for a whole image, or finding harmonious colors within one range.
Every result is a real pastel stick, shown with its maker’s own name and number.
How the app is used is up to the painter. Some will open it out of curiosity; others will find a practical, everyday use for it. Each person will find their own way of working with it.
Why it exists
Soft pastel has an enormous number of colors. Each professional brand has its own philosophy and its own approach to color, and the ranges differ greatly from one another. Some brands offer a few dozen sticks; others offer many hundreds. This abundance is one of the great pleasures of the medium, and also one of its real difficulties.
A painter working in oil or acrylic usually knows their paints by name and number, and knows how one differs from another. With soft pastel this is much harder. Sticks lose their wrappers, numbers are small or missing, and the ranges are simply too large to hold in memory. Many pastel painters make swatch charts and write down numbers for exactly this reason: when a stick runs out, they want to buy the same one again, or something very close to it.
There is another common situation. A painter may notice that a particular color keeps coming back in their work — for example, a muted, yellowish color that is neither ochre nor yellow, a complex color that is useful for warm shadows. Having found it in one brand, it is natural to want to know which other brands make something similar. Since no two brands produce exactly the same complex color, a painter may well want several of them, to have that color in as many variations as possible.
In principle this can be done by visiting each manufacturer’s website, opening its color chart, or browsing an online shop. In practice, looking for one specific color across many brands this way is very difficult, and comparing a color in one brand with colors in another is almost impossible.
Pure, unmixed pigments tend to look very similar from one brand to the next: a cadmium red from one maker will usually be close to a cadmium red from another. But as soon as colors become complex — and complex colors are exactly what makes professional soft pastel so rich — the differences between brands become significant.
How it came about
Soft Pastel Color Studio was made by Lena Rivo, a pastel painter and teacher.
The project began as an attempt to gather, organize and compare the colors of the major soft pastel brands. The first tool to appear was Alternative: choose a stick from one brand and see what the other brands offer in its place. Once the colors were organized and could be compared in any direction, the other tools followed — working with photographs, building a palette for a whole image, and exploring color harmonies. These were not the starting point; they grew out of the same data as new ways of using it.
Who it is for
The app is for soft pastel painters at any level, from someone with their first small set to a painter with hundreds of sticks. It may be useful when you want to:
find which pastels correspond to a color in a photograph or a painting;
find a color you have in mind within one brand or several;
find a replacement for a stick that has run out or is hard to buy where you live;
see how many variations of a favorite color exist across different brands;
find complementary or other harmonious colors within one brand or within your own collection.
The brands
The app currently includes the ranges of 23 soft pastel brands, 7,826 colors in total:
Art Spectrum Soft · Blockx Soft Pastels · Blue Earth · Conté à Paris Soft Pastels · Daler-Rowney Artists’ Soft Pastels · Diane Townsend Soft Form · Faber-Castell Creative Studio Soft Pastels · Girault · Great American · Holbein Artists’ Soft Pastels · Jackson’s Handmade Soft Pastel · La Maison du Pastel · Mount Vision · Mungyo Gallery Extra Fine · Mungyo Gallery Hand Made · PanPastel · Prismacolor NuPastel · Rembrandt · Richeson Handmade Soft · Schmincke · Sennelier · Terry Ludwig · Unison Colour
Only colors that are currently in production are included. Discontinued sticks are not offered as results.
What the app does
Five tools, used independently and in any order:
Image — sample a color from a photograph or a painting and find the closest pastels.
Color — choose a color on the wheel and search one brand, several, or all of them.
Alternative — take one stick and see what other brands offer in its place.
Harmony — find complementary and related colors as real sticks.
Library holds your own collection and your saved projects. Once your pastels are entered, every tool marks the sticks you already own as In Your Box, and Palette and Harmony can work from your collection alone.
See how it works, step by step →
An important note about layers. Soft pastel is rarely applied in a single layer. Palette represents an image as flat shapes filled with individual sticks, so its suggestions should be read as a starting point. The painter can then adjust temperature and nuance by layering other colors. Ideally, the base stick should already be close in hue and value to the shape being painted.
Recent Colors
A strip at the top of the screen shows the last eight colors selected. Tap a swatch to return to it; Clear removes them. The strip is shared between Image, Color, Alternative and Harmony, but does not appear in Palette.
Printing and sharing a list
Wherever the app gives a list of matching pastels, a printer icon lets you print it, save it as a PDF, or share it. The page shows the searched color followed by one section per brand, with each stick’s color sample, name, catalogue number and match rating.
How colors are compared
Where the color data comes from
The app’s catalogue is compiled from two sources:
Manufacturers’ published color charts — what each maker states about its own sticks.
Paul Centore, A Color Survey of Artist’s Pastels (2016) — an independent study in which real pastel sticks were physically measured with a spectrophotometer.
These sources are kept separate. Where a physical measurement exists, the app always uses it; 3,005 colors in the catalogue come from such measurements. Where no measurement exists, it uses the color published by the manufacturer.
How closeness is measured
Colors are compared using CIEDE2000, an international standard for measuring perceived color difference. It takes lightness, saturation and hue into account, including corrections for areas where the eye is especially sensitive.
Difference • Rating
less than 2 • Almost Identical
2 to 5 • Very Close
5 to 10 • Close
more than 10 • not offered as a match
Above a difference of 10, two sticks read as different colors on paper, so the app never offers them as substitutes. For a photograph, the image is first reduced in size and a small patch of pixels is averaged. In Alternative, the data of the two sticks is compared directly.
What the ratings mean — and what they don’t
It is important not to treat the app as a tool that matches colors with 100% accuracy. No two brands make exactly the same color, and sticks of the same color can vary slightly from batch to batch, especially when handmade.
A catalogue value describes a clean, single-layer swatch. On paper, color also depends on pressure, the color and texture of the paper, what lies underneath, and the light in the room.
So Almost Identical means the two catalogue colors are very close. It does not mean that strokes made with them will be indistinguishable. The app finds similar colors based on measured and published color data.
Price, platforms and privacy
Free
No subscription and no purchases.
iPhone, iPad and Android
Available across mobile platforms.
Works fully offline
The whole catalogue is stored in the app.
Your images stay on your device
Photographs are chosen from the device and analyzed there.
Web version
The same tools are also available on the web at www.lenarivo.com/soft-pastel-color-studio. The web version has no accounts, so projects cannot be saved there; saving projects is available in the app only.