Pastels

This is my latest pastel drawing that I finished yesterday. I really should have used better quality paper but I'm still learning. Drawing this wasn't even the hard part. The hard part was shading it with the pastels. It is definitely one of the messiest of the different media types of tried. I went thru a lot of fresh wipes for my hands and my clothes were covered in pastel dust.
The funniest thing is that since I didn't have any professional training until recently I never really learned 'art etiquett' and didn't realize you weren't supposed to 'blow' the excess pastel dust off your paper as you are working on it.
My mom takes this class with me and she caught me doing it and told me that I really wasn't supposed to do that because it is impolite to the people around you.

I swear I cannot break the habit!! It's all that conditioned memory reflex from years of school using a pencil and eraser I guess. At the end of my project the teacher came over to look over my work and he added a little more value (color) to the background to make it darker. He carefully picked up my paper, carried to the door and shook it off outside. So I said to him, "I'm really sorry I didn't realize I was blowing the pastel dust off my paper until my mom had to correct me". He said, "yes well we really don't want to have to wear protective masks to do our art"...yikes! I felt my face flush.
I think until I get that habit under control I'm going back to doing watercolors for a while!