Look at the brilliant landscape on the front cover of this book and the glowing still life below and imagine achieving such soft, luminous effects in your own pastel paintings. Thanks to the practical instruction in these pages, you will soon know how to use the beautiful, delicate pastel medium to create light-filled landscapes, sophisticated still lifes, and pleasing portraits.<BR>Beginning with materials and methods, then moving on to practical, step-by-step demonstrations, master pastelist Larry Blovits shares with readers the time-tested theories and techniques he employs in producing his widely admired, award winning paintings. You will learn how to blend hard and soft pastels into radiant gradations of opaque and transparent colors; bring contrasts of bright light and dramatic shadows to your paintings; build basic shapes into realistic, three-dimensional forms; handle perspective and create the illusion of depth and space; and design animated, balanced compositions with eye-catching focal points.