The Beginner's Guide Pastels: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide to Techniques and Materials

by Angela Gair

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.

Genres: Crafts, Nonfiction

95 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1998

About the author

Angela Gair is a painter and writer. She studied fine art at Sheffield Polytechnic in England and then spent several years painting in Italy, Spain, France and Switzerland. An art teacher as well as a practising artist, she has also contributed to art education magazines and has written several instructional art books.

Reviews

[Tope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great starter book that doesn't just list techniques, it shows step by step instructions for creating a complete pastel painting for each technique discussed.