Jennifer Gaston, age 12, of Wilmington, Del., for her question:

WHAT IS A PASTEL?

A pastel is a chaiklike crayon painting. Its colors are soft and durable.

Pastels can be made more quickly than oil or watercolor paintings. But the paintings can soil easily and should be kept under glass. They can also be sprayed with a resin called a fixative.

Pastel is also the name for the sticks or crayons with which the pictures are drawn or painted. Pastels are made of chalk and pigment  mixed with gum water and dried in the form of crayons.

Pastels can be applied on a painting with a sharp edge of the crayon to make a thin line, or with the side of the crayon to make a broad line.

Charcoal crayons are used mostly for drawing the human figure or for portraits of faces.

Of all paints, pastels come nearest to the brilliance of the original dry pigment. They do so because they are not made with a liquid binder, which normally darkens paints. Because no binder holds the pigment together, pastel colors rub off easily.