998.

While out on a walk at dusk one day, this tree caught my attention:

The tree was begging to be redrawn in pastels. Here was my first attempt:

The actual drawing was better than it looks in the above picture. Unfortunately at this stage, I was concerned about the fragility of pastels and convinced I needed to spray the drawing with a Pastel Fixative to preserve it. Little did I know that fixatives turn the colors to mud - turns out most professional artists will not use fixatives (except to create intermediate working surfaces)!

Here's take-2, this time on better paper and with no fixative:

Pastels are the most vibrant of all art materials because there is very little binder in a pastel (often it's the binders that dull down the pigment in art materials). The downside is that the pigment is so lightly bound that even a sneeze might blow it off. As a result you need to frame a pastel behind glass to keep it safe.