Choosing a paper for pastels

My first choice for a pastel paper would have to be any decent, heavy-duty hand-made watercolor paper... Strong and rough with nice jagged edges!! India produces some really excellent papers of this type and they are well-worth looking out for the next time you visit a professional artist's store.

A very close second and, in some ways, also my first choice is Waterford Watercolor, Rough

After that; anything with plenty of 'tooth' to hold the pastels - and strong enough to withstand some scraping and a lot of water and fixatives. (Rather than buying pre-coloured pastel papers, I tend to make a watercolor wash using pastels and a wet paint brush to create my initial background colors, layout and color scheme... after that, I always go over the top with fixatives - except in the final layer where I never use them.)

Canson Me Tientes pastel papers are readily available in the Philippines, where I live - but I find that they are not really strong enough to withstand the kind of rough-handling that my style of painting demands. However, because they come in a wide variety of colors, they are great for when I want to really force myself to go easy on the application of pastel and to try and keep to a more traditional style of pastel painting with at least a bit of the original paper color showing through.