CHAPTER ONE
what you’ll need to begin

Evening in Palo Duro Canyon
11" × 17" (28cm × 43cm)

Like many artists, I began my artistic career with oil paints. After many years and a developing problem with sensitivity to solvents, I switched to acrylics. Some years later, I began to feel my work was getting stale. I dabbled in watercolor, but then I discovered pastels. From across the room, the glow of the colors in pastels caught my eye again and again, so I decided to give them a try. I fell in love with the colors, the texture and the ability to achieve effects I’d never come close to in any other medium. I loved the immediacy—the fact that what you see on the surface is what you get, with no waiting to dry, no color changes, no varnish—and the direct, tactile application of the medium. I’ve come to believe it’s the most versatile, and in many ways the easiest, of all the mediums. But like any medium, pastel has a few tricks of the trade, and I’m happy to share them in these pages.