Pastels Unleashed

Margaret Evans shows artists how to unleash the creative power of pastels. She shares her huge enthusiasm for the medium and her expertise in the properties of pastels, showing how to choose papers or use underpainting techniques to make the most of them. She demonstrates the stages: sketching in, blocking in and then building up, that lead to a successful painting, and then the dry and wet techniques that really unleash the potential of pastels. She shows how to use turpentine and how to dilute or intensify colours, and there is information of composition, perspective, painting figures and mood and atmosphere, all helping equip the reader to paint in her fantastically creative way. She also shows how she develops painting ideas from her wonderfully inspiring photographs, workbooks and travel diaries. There are then six beautiful step by step demonstrations.

Margaret Evans is a well-known artist and practical art teacher who specialises in figure work and portraiture, as well as pastel painting. She has exhibited her work with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Pastel Society and the United Society of Artists and now runs extremely successful painting courses from her studio in Scotland, as well as working on commissions in all media. Margaret is an established contributor to the leisure painting press and has made a number of practical art videos.