Terry Ludwig Pastels - Maggie Price Basic Values Set of 60

He makes the best pastels you can find anywhere! Great local guy in Denver has been doing this for years.

I bought the Maggie Price 6-color Ludwig set a little more than a month ago, and I've been enjoying it ever since.The texture is very soft. Supposedly Schminke is softer, but I've found Schminkes to be greasy, opposed to my Ludwigs, which are creamy. The consistency makes it perfect for top coats. Once you use them on a piece, it is hard to go back and use harder pastels (i.e. Faber Castell or NuPastel) because the harder pastel just scratches into the Ludwigs, but that isn't any fault of the Ludwigs.The color range is pretty good. I wanted a basic, orange-red-yellow-green-blue-purple set, which is hard to find (most sets seem to predicate "portrait" or "landscape") If that's what you're looking for, then perhaps you might be disappointed: there are not a real primary yellow, nor is there a good, true orange, purple, or green. But they do have interesting hues: the yellows pull towards orange for a Napoli/ochre type feel; there are two greens in my set--one cooler and one warmer, and the warm green in particular has a larger range of value than what you see in the picture. The range of purples are good, with very light, very dark, and several intermediary violets. The blues are of the ultramarine variety and offer perhaps the best range in value. There are a couple "orangish" colors but no real orange. The reds tend towards either red-earth or burgundy. There are four good, "very light" pastels in very light turquoise, yellow, olive green, and violet. There are also 7 good "very dark" pastels (red earth, burgundy, cool green, warm green, purple, brown, and blue). The dark purple is particularly sumptuous, and super useful for all kinds of shadows. The set includes 12 browns (again, 6 that are cooler, 6 that are warmer). No grays, but with the complimentaries you should be able to mix your own.I bought a full set of Faber Castell and three color family sets of Mount Vision at the same time, and while I like the number and range of the Faber Castell set (120) and the Mount Visions are bigger, it's the Ludwig that I keep reaching for. Wish I hadn't spent the money on the others and I'd just gotten a full set of the Ludwigs instead.ONE HUGE WARNING HOWEVER: While the picture overall represents the pastels very well, the line second from the top--the one with the grayish blues--looks nothing like anything I have in my set. Instead, my set has 6 values of turquoise. The turquoise are pretty colors, but I actually haven't been using them much. I saw my set in person before I bought, so I'm not disappointed, but clarify exactly what is in the set if you are looking for particular colors.

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