Jamie - Pastel on New Paper

This is a portrait of Jamie, the daughter of one of my oldest friends who passed away in December. This was taken when she was a teenager when she used to come over with Richard and model for me. The is the second actual physical drawing that I've done in the last seventeen years. The goal was to find a way to get a more solid look from pastel. So I am using a different paper that will hold more chalk. One that wasn't available 20 years ago.
The paper used is Pastelmat, instead of my usual Canson Mi Tientes. It is about $10 a sheet rather than $3, but is much heavier and does indeed hold more layers of chalk. It is more aggressive in holding the chalk, which is good, but also meant that I have to change how I draw with the pastels.
This painting is only 9x12, compared to the last one I posted here last time, which was 19x25. What I learned very early in this painting is that it is too small for pastels! My chalks are 3/8 to 3/4 inch and my pastel pencils about 1/8 inch (I don't sharpen them, it wastes too much of the pencils). But the irises of this painting are just a 32nd larger than 1/4 inch. Too small for much detail with my 1/8 and up tools. I will work a little bigger next time to make details easier. Size doesn't matter with a digital painting, but the real world has no zoom.

The notes below the step by step pictures described the different process I had to use.

Except that I should have done it larger, this was a success in starting to improve my pastels. The chalk layer is more opaque and solid looking than previous pastels on Canson paper which always look a little washed out and low contrast. More solid, opaque surfaces, stronger color and stronger contrast was the goal here.
I just got some Pan Pastels that can be premixed to make your own colors. I will be trying that on another piece shortly, on the same Pastelmat paper. Hopefully this will let me get around the limited colors of pastels. I never have the correct color I want when blocking in a face like I do with digital. But with these I can premix colors where needed just like I do in oils. We'll see how successful, messy and wasting of pastels that turns out to be.