The two ways to lighten a color, why one keeps the glow and the other kills it, and which paints go clean pale versus chalky
Introduction
Pastel tones are the soft, pale versions of colors. Dusty pink instead of red. Powder blue instead of ultramarine. Cream instead of yellow.
They carry a particular feeling: calm, delicate, a little nostalgic. That is why they show up so often in floral painting, in dreamy landscapes, in nursery illustration, and in anything meant to feel gentle.
In watercolor there are two ways to get there, and they produce different results. One keeps the transparency that makes watercolor glow. The other trades some of that glow for coverage. Knowing which you are doing, and when each one is right, is most of the skill.
Everything in this article was tested with two student-grade sets: the Pentel Arts 24-tube set and the Van Gogh Botanical Selection, 24 pans.
1. What Makes a Tone "Pastel"
A pastel tone is a color with high lightness and reduced saturation. The hue is still recognizable. A pastel pink is unmistakably pink. It has simply moved up the value scale and lost some intensity on the way.
That distinction matters because it separates pastel tones from two neighbors that get confused with them:
- Muted tones have lowered saturation but normal lightness. Sage green is muted, not pastel.
- Tints in the strict sense are colors mixed with white, which is one route to a pastel but not the only one.
 |
| Sage green |
In watercolor the most common route is not white at all. It is water.
2. The Central Choice: Water or White
This is the decision every pastel tone in watercolor comes down to.
Lightening with water
You dilute the paint. Less pigment sits on the paper, more white paper shows through, and the color reads as lighter.
The glow stays. Light still travels down through the pigment, hits the paper, and comes back out. The color remains transparent.
Lightening with white
You add white paint. The pigment load stays the same but the mix becomes opaque, and the color reads as lighter because white particles are reflecting light at the surface.
The glow goes. Light now bounces off the top rather than passing through. The result is flatter, slightly milky, and closer to how gouache behaves.
Which to use
Default to water. It preserves what makes watercolor watercolor.
Reach for white when you need the color to sit on top of something already painted, when you want an opaque highlight, or when you specifically want the soft, slightly chalky quality that white produces. That quality is not a flaw. It is a legitimate look, and in some paintings it is exactly right.
The two whites I have are the Pentel White tube and Van Gogh Zinc White 106. Zinc White is semi-transparent, which means it lightens without going fully opaque. For pastel tones that is an advantage. A titanium white, which most sets do not include, would cover far more aggressively.
For a fuller treatment of white as a color in its own right, including the other six ways to get white into a watercolor, How to Use White in Watercolor: 8 Options and When to Use Each covers the whole range.
3. Not Every Pigment Dilutes the Same Way
This is the part that surprised me most when I swatched it properly, and it is the part most articles skip.
Diluting two different paints to the same lightness does not give you two equally clean pastels. The pigment's own character comes through, and sometimes it comes through more at high dilution than at full strength.
Staining pigments stay clean
Prussian Blue 508 and the quinacridones (Quinacridone Rose 366, Quinacridone Purple Red 592, Quinacridone Purple Blue 593) hold their hue beautifully when diluted. The pale version is a clean, even, convincing pastel.
These are the easiest paints to get good pastel tones from. If you are starting out, start here.
Granulating pigments get texture
Ultramarine 506 granulates. The pigment particles settle into the texture of the paper instead of spreading evenly.
At full strength you barely notice. At pastel dilution the granulation becomes the dominant feature, and instead of a smooth powder blue you get a speckled one.
Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you want. For a soft sky it can be beautiful. For a flat background wash it is a mess. Test before committing it to a large area.
Opaque pigments can go chalky
Some opaque paints turn slightly grey and dusty when heavily diluted rather than staying clean. The Pentel black does this, as I covered in Should You Use Black in Watercolor?, and some of the denser opaques behave similarly.
Quick reference
| Pigment type | Diluted result | Good for pastels? |
|---|---|---|
|
Staining (Prussian Blue, quinacridones) |
Clean, even, true to hue | Best choice |
|
Granulating (Ultramarine) |
Textured, speckled | Yes, if you want texture |
| Opaque / dense | Can go grey and dusty | Test first |
|
Earth tones (ochres, siennas) |
Soft and warm, very natural | Excellent for warm pastels |
4. The Paints That Are Already Pastel
Worth knowing: some tubes come pre-lightened at the factory.
In the Pentel set, Naples Yellow and Pale Orange are both already soft, pale versions of stronger colors. They contain white in the formulation, which is why they look chalky in the tube.
That makes them genuinely useful shortcuts. A pale peach that would take careful mixing is simply there in the tube.
It also means they behave like the white route rather than the water route. They are slightly opaque, they sit on the surface, and they will not glow the way a diluted transparent color does. Use them knowing that.
In the Van Gogh set, Azomethine Green Yellow 296 sits in similar territory on the warm yellow-green side.
5. Mixing Pastels With Other Colors
Beyond diluting a single pigment, you can build a pastel by mixing a strong color with a light one before diluting.
Combinations I use:
- Quinacridone Rose 366 + a touch of Naples Yellow, then diluted: a warm dusty pink closer to skin and peonies than straight pink
- Cerulean Blue 535 + Zinc White 106: a soft sky blue that holds steady in a large wash
- Sap Green 623 heavily diluted + a drop of Yellow Ochre: the pale sage green that appears in almost every vintage floral
That last one bridges into a neighboring idea. Lowering saturation and lowering value are different moves, and combining them gives you a different family of colors. The article on How to Mix Watercolor Neutrals: Browns, Grays and Muted Tones covers the saturation side in full.
6. Where Pastel Tones Work
Florals. Peonies, daisies, lavender, hydrangea. Any flower whose actual color is soft looks wrong painted at full saturation.
Backgrounds. A pale wash behind a subject separates it from the white paper without competing for attention. This is probably the single most useful application.
Skies and distance. Objects further away appear lighter and less saturated. Pastel tones are how you paint depth.
Coloring pages. This one deserves its own paragraph.
On a printed coloring page the black outlines already supply all the contrast the image needs. Strong color fights with them, and the result reads as heavy and crowded. Pale tones let the printed lines do their job while the color provides mood.
There is a second reason. Coloring pages are usually printed on lighter paper than watercolor paper, so they hold fewer layers before the surface gives out. A pastel tone applied once in the right strength beats three approximate layers every time.
If you color printed pages, How to Plan Colors on Coloring Pages and How to Choose Colors for Coloring Pages both go deeper into building a scheme before you start.
7. Three Problems and Their Causes
"My pastel wash came out blotchy"
Inconsistent water-to-pigment ratio across the wash. You mixed more water into one part of the brush load than another.
Fix: mix the full quantity you need in a well on the palette before you start, rather than reloading from the pan mid-wash.
"It dried much lighter than I painted it"
Normal. Watercolor loses intensity as it dries, and the effect is proportionally largest at high dilution, which is exactly where pastel tones live.
Expect it and compensate. Why Does Watercolor Look Faded When Dry? goes into how much and why.
"It looks chalky and dead"
Either too much white, or an opaque pigment that does not dilute cleanly. Switch to the water route, or switch to a staining pigment.
8. The Exercise
Make a dilution ladder.
Choose six colors that span the wheel. For each one, paint five squares going from full strength to barely tinted. Twenty seconds per square, half an hour for the whole chart.
Then do it again for three of those colors using Zinc White instead of water, and put the two ladders next to each other.
Let everything dry completely before you judge it.
What you get is a reference sheet showing exactly how your paints behave, which ones go clean pale, which ones granulate, and how different the water route looks from the white route. Label everything. This chart will save you more time than any amount of reading.
Conclusion
Pastel tones in watercolor are mostly a water management skill. Get the ratio right and the color does the rest.
The one decision worth making deliberately every time is water or white. Water keeps the transparency. White trades it for coverage. Neither is wrong, and the paintings that look confused are usually the ones where the painter was not aware a choice was being made.
If you take one thing away, swatch your own paints. Mine behave the way I described, and yours might differ depending on brand and pigment. Thirty minutes with a sheet of paper tells you more than anything I can write.
For the opposite end of the value scale, where the question becomes how to get dark without going flat, Should You Use Black in Watercolor? covers that territory.
Happy painting.
