By rummaging in old libraries, I uncovered several ancient recipes for pastels. The authors most certainly had uses in mind other than street painting, but they served as a starting point. These were personal formulas based on the experiences and intuitions of the artists who wrote them down. They called for mixing natural pigments with a range of comestible binders, such as sugar, milk, fig’s milk, beer, ale, and honey. Orwell reports that pavement artists bought their colors in the form of powder and worked them into cakes using condensed milk as the binder. The old recipes simply consisted of ingredient lists, without mixing proportions, apart from the occasional spoonful or cupful of an ingredient (although there was no standardization for the size of a spoon or cup).

After much experimentation, I devised a recipe that accounted for the peculiarities of each pigment, which enabled me to make pastels with the color and texture I wanted.