The Beginner's Guide Pastels

Pastels capture lightning in a bottle, for this medium works spectacularly well when painting quickly. Pastels blend so smoothly and swiftly that you can portray the immediate moment -- that brief shift of light, or that sudden scene -- before it fades and disappears. Choose from soft pastels with vibrant colors that smudge perfectly; hard pastels, for adding crisp details; easily controlled pencils; and oil pastels for buttery strokes. Apply these to a variety of surfaces, from pastel, watercolor, charcoal, and velour papers to canvas and cotton fabrics. Experiment with texture, color, and toning. Accessories such as craft knives, charcoal, torchons, brushes, tissues, and fixatives create a diversity of effects and protect the finished painting. Directions explain how to clean, erase, and fix pastels A gallery of modern paintings will hone your skills for overlaying color, feathering, blending, working on canvas, using colored grounds, mixing media, making expressive strokes, pointillism, hatching and crosshatching, and using glasspaper.