The Beginner's Guide: Pastels

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Pastels capture lightning in a bottle, as this medium works spectacularly well when painting quickly. Pastels blend smoothly and swiftly, allowing you to portray the immediate moment—those brief shifts of light or sudden scenes—before they fade away. 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, including pastel, watercolor, charcoal, and velour papers, as well as 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 help you hone your skills in overlaying color, feathering, blending, working on canvas, using colored grounds, mixing media, making expressive strokes, pointillism, hatching and crosshatching, and using glasspaper.