"I suppose everyone has their little quirks," says pastel artist Marie Meyer, "And mine is this: I really dislike duplicating my pastel colors." The artist is a self-described fanatic about weeding out duplicates from her pastel box. "Having duplicates in there slows down my work," she says, "as I find myself dithering over which stick to choose when they are, in fact, the same color!" Meyer also wants to avoid duplicate colors because she doesn't want to carry around a lot of dead weight in her pastel box—space that could be occupied perhaps by some new, unique color that would add something fresh to her palette. So, Meyer decided to do something about it. The outcome is a new multi-brand color chart of pastels—a 136-page reference guide that covers all open stock artist pastels.

"Before I took up art I worked in high-tech," Meyer says. "My experience there taught me that there are useful scientific methods for identifying and describing color with great precision. And so I decided to put that experience to work to create a new classification scheme for pastels that would making shopping easier and efficient." Her integrated color chart details the appearance of more than 5,700 sticks from 24 brands of soft and hard pastels. To see how it works, check out the chart below.

Pastel Society of America Hall of Fame artist, Alan Flattmann, had this to say: "Marie Meyer's Multi-Brand Color Chart for Pastels gives us an amazingly simple method of identifying color in a precise way.  It takes the mystery out of understanding color by showing how to think about color in terms of hue, chroma and value." You can find out what other artists are saying about the resource—and place an order—online at www.huechroval.com.