Transform photos into a fine art drawing with Pastel, Pencil, Chalk, Charcoal and Crayon. Introducing Pastello, a brand-new companion app to JixiPix’s Impresso Pro. Pastello takes you back in time to the 15th century. Away from brushes and large strokes and into the realm of dry media with color that is both brilliant and subtle. The “Dry color method” made famous by Leonardo da Vinci is so powerful in its simplicity and beauty with its black and red chalk and yellow pastel highlights. Later, artists would paint charming portraits in a smooth heavily blended fashion.

Move forward a few centuries later and pastel quickly became filled with brilliant color and crisp detail. Fast forward to today and a digital age has made it so you, the artist, can mix and match media that is difficult or impossible in a traditional setting.

Pastello has a pro workflow that automatically transforms a photo into a pastel drawing and places it on an art paper with options to customize. The Pastel can then be changed to Chalk, Charcoal, Colored Pencil, Graphite, Conte or Crayon using Layer styles. The medias start out delicate like traditional drawings do, then allows you to build them up using fills, shading and detail layers. The medias are beautiful as they are, or mix them for an expressive artwork.

Pastello includes plenty of traditional sketch styles as well as a DaVinci effect using a mixed media of pencil, charcoal, crayon and old paper. It’s easy to use! We have mixed the media into one-click presets with all the freedom to customize, blend and fine-tune for your own unique artwork filled with age, depth and timeless beauty as if created by the renaissance artist himself.

Pastel—(Soft) is a soft, buttery consistency and intense color. This effect is dense and filled with the grain of the paper. Artists find this media especially good for plein air landscapes because the color ranges are vibrant and the media itself is dustless and portable.
Chalk—(Hard Pastel) is a light dusty effect with little specks of preserved paper. This chalky pastel is known for it’s soft strokes and velvety texture. This style is great for creating a fine web of color by stacking or duplicating layers, letting the ones below show through to create a drawing sparkling with interest.
Charcoal—creates a velvety black charcoal effect with shades of grey. Use it for warming up the under painting of a composition, or to complete a finished charcoal piece.
Colored Pencil—creates soft colorful strokes in the drawing that can be layered to build up color then burnished with a light Pencil Layer, or the Smudge tool.
Pencil—creates pencil drawings with fluid outlines and soft, limpid tonal shadings for a drawing filled with warmth and charm.
Conté—is a beautiful crayon media for enhancing highlights, midtones and shadows in drawings using five classic colors: Bistre, Sanguine, White, Grey, Gold and a color picker to choose your own—with options for crosshatching and scumbling.
Crayon—creates a colorful waxy base to a drawing, then burnish it with a Conte White for highlights or Bistre for shading.
Fill Brush— Choose to brush in areas of the drawing with chalk, charcoal, colored pencil or pencil on the layer or fill the entire layer as a base for Pencil, Chalk and Charcoal.

- Pastel, Chalk, Charcoal, Conte, Colored Pencil, Pencil and Crayon style effects true to real media. Each one has control over stroke size, stroke volume, color and other refinements.
- Da Vinci style effect mixes 5 fully customizable medias onto aged paper for an old world appearance.
- Stroke technology inspired by real-world Pastellists
- Smart Layers for blending pastel styles with options to reorder, duplicate and delete. This powerful feature is great for mixing media.
- Fill Layer for hand brushing color and texture
- Paper Layer that reacts to dry media like real paper would. The more you layer the media the more it fills into the paper’s texture.
- Smart Brushes for touching up brush strokes
- Smudge Brush for smearing media for a softer appearance
- Brush Masking to invert, clear or fill in brushed areas
- Presets for a quick start
- Customizable Presets to develop your own unique and personal style, or to save your projects with all strokes and layers intact for future editing.
- User Preset category to store your personalized style in
- Favorite preset feature sends presets to the front when marked
- 5 Paper Textures
- 41 Artistic and Aged Papers
- 70 Artistic Finishes for adding light and color to drawings
- Smart links to globally unify color and finishes across all layers
- 24 Artistic Edges for creating sketchy vignettes around artwork. Each one has options for edge stroke size and blend.
- Plugin for Photoshop CS3+, Lightroom and Elements for Mac & Windows

Compatibility: Mac OS X 10.6 or later 64-bit

Adobe Photoshop CS3+, CC, CC 2014 or CC 2015, Photoshop Elements 10-13 or Lightroom 4+

Home Page - http://jixipix.com/pastello/details.html