Conte Pastel Pencil is ideally designed for all kinds of pastel drawings. This non-toxic pencil features wood-encased lead and is sold in assorted colours.

The exceptional diameter of the Conté pastel pencil (5 mm) lead gives genuine freedom of creation and has an unrivalled feel.

Pastel pencils are the perfect pencil companion to soft pastels because their lead is slightly harder with less pigment. It is preferable to Conté soft pastels and crayons when details are required for small and medium-sized formats.

Conté à Paris

Frenchman Nicolas Conté was a classic 18th-century Renaissance man: a chemist, inventor, soldier and balloonist, and artist. Most importantly, for our purposes, he created the pencil as we know it, responding to a wartime lack of British graphite by mixing the material with clay, thereby introducing the possibility of different degrees of hardness. He then invented the Conté Carré Crayon, a firm pastel used by Degas and Picasso, among others. The company is still famed for these and its other ranges of pastels, crayons and pencils.

Use this colour chart as an approximation of the actual colour. If exact colour matching is necessary, use actual samples of the materials.