Information about Our Products

Our Pastel Sticks

Each pastel is crafted by hand with a broad range of pigments with minimal natural binders.  Our process renders highly concentrated velvety pastels. Daily colors are mixed and formed into sticks all by hand using a unique process invented and refined by Terry.  Our employees are specially trained in the art of color and quality of soft pastels.

Many years ago, when Terry first started using pastels, he grew frustrated with the limitations of the cylinder shaped sticks.  Because of the chalk stick like shape, Terry was unable to achieve the detail and finer aspects of art in his painting, so he went to work himself figuring out a solution.  Thus, the first rectangular shaped soft pastel in the world was born.  Because of their quality and shape, our sticks  deliver thick, broad strokes or thin, precise lines where necessary.  The size of our pastels is approximately 1 ½” x ½” x ½”.  Because each pastel is handcrafted with unique pigments, size and shape may vary slightly.

Our Colors


Frustrated with the lack of color options available and few choices for very soft pastels, our founder, Terry Ludwig began experimenting with formulas to make his own pastels.  Terry’s goal was to create a vast array of color in pastels that were uniformly soft across all densities of hue.  One of Terry’s first attempts to broaden the color spectrum was to create more green sticks.  As Terry said, “there just weren’t enough shades of green soft pastels to capture nature, so I had to make new colors.”

Throughout the years, Terry and his staff have continued to “see” colors in the world that were not yet captured in Terry Ludwig soft pastels.  Terry Ludwig Pastels was the first soft pastel manufacturer in the world to create our famous Eggplant (V100) colored stick.  This stick with a deep purple hue is darker than black.  Additionally  we created our family of Shades of Nature sticks that offer a muted color family not offered by anyone else.  As a result, today Terry Ludwig Pastels boasts over 600 beautiful pastels.  The number of pastels offered by TLP greatly changes from year to year as we “see” more colors that need to be created to serve the soft pastel artist market.

Our Sets

In about 2006, Terry Ludwig Pastels (TLP) started creating our sets of pastels to make it easier for artists to buy pastels based on their need, be it portrait, landscape or other types of work.  So throughout the years as our stick and color selection expanded, so has our array of sets.  Today TLP offers a selection of 31 different sets in addition to our 750 piece Full Set that includes every current color of TLP pastels.  While Terry and his staff have created most of our sets, several have been birthed by artist friends of the Ludwig family.  Maggie Price, Richard McKinley, Marsha Savage and Liz Haywood-Sullivan have all shared their passion for Terry Ludwig Pastels in the creation of sets for us.  Our set sizes are 14, 30 and 60 pieces.