When you first start painting, you'll probably buy a boxed set of pastels. Rembrandt, Winsor-Newton, Grumbacher - all have sets of 20, 40, 60 and more pastels boxed together. You can select a 'portrait palette', a 'landscape selection' and so on.

As long as you're satisfied with your first set, storage is fairly simple. You simply put the sticks back into the foam padding they were originally shipped with. However, if you're like me, you'll soon be buying pastel sticks like a junkie - open stock, estate sales, eBay... And then you'll have to decide how to store them all.

Everyone evolves their own idiocyncratic storage solutions, and every pastel how-to book shows off the author's particular solutions. This article shows mine.

Eventually, your sticks will be broken, unlabelled and anonymous. So you might as well just sort by color groups in something like a muffin tin. Below is the top of my home-made 'palette table'. The sticks that have been employed in the work in progress are left out of the tins, and lie atop a bit of foam that formerly lined a boxed set. So if a stick is not in a tin or box, I know it's been used recently. I re-sort them back into the muffin tins only when the painting is 'done', whenever that is.

The white plastic item in the back is a tupperware silverware tray - it holds my charcoal, conte crayons, erasers, etc.

Below is a look at my entire pastel array. The standing bin was a real coup - it is a store display that held open-stock Rembrandt pastels in my local art-n-craft store. When they held a going-out-of-business sale, I scored some of the store display items which are eminently suitable for controlling art-supply clutter.

The tabletop on the display was something I made out of purchased particle board. I used wood-glue and screws to fix it to the top of the display, and made a raised lip around the top out of slats to keep sticks from rolling off. The surface is usually covered with squares of foam from boxed sets.The entire thing, which I think of as my 'palette table', stands about three feet high - just right for working at my easel either standing or sitting.

Below is my set of Conte Soft Pastels. These are hard to find in the US for some reason, but are often available new on eBay. They're excellent for roughing in your painting - they're harder than most soft pastels, yet not as hard as pastel pencils. A great addition to a well-stocked pastel collection.