Hard pastels are relatively new to the artist market. Traditional pastel artists probably cringe when they hear hard pastels. A number of manufacturers have hard pastels on the market.

“Méxican Vibrations or Vibraçiones Méxicans” was a series of Mexican landscape scenes and people paintings using hard pastels; the hard pastels were intermixed with soft pastels in Sal-Zar Medium™ on Stonehenge® paper. The hard pastels are somewhat difficult to control. I have found that I can use hard pastels, scraped on top of an existing image, that has been coated with Sal-Zar Medium.