Painting Brilliant Skies & Water in Pastel: Secrets to Bringing Light and Life to Your Landscapes

I truly believe that a skyline helps a landscape picture, it puts one into a mood, either relaxed or stormy.When there is water in a picture it should not just be a flat unchanging color, it should show some life. Just my opinion.

Book spends a lot of time covering basic art principles. So if you like to refresh yourself in these areas it is good. Some things that she covers are explicitly related to sky, land and water representations. Which is great coverage of these areas. Also step by step building up of the pastel medium from the background forward. I am pleased with the beautiful art work it includes. This is a a keeper for my art library. Just a nice book all around.

For about six months, I've been painting with pastels, and I've sunk serious money into a diverse pastel library. First and foremost, I want to stress to new artists that as a beginner, you will usually glean far more from a person/teacher than a book. Finding useful pastel books has been an expensive and uphill battle for me. However, for a serious pastelist with some experience under her belt, I feel I can recommend 'Painting Brilliant Skies & Water in Pastel'.The book is divided into several sections and chapters: the importance of sky in landscape; the importance of water in landscape; getting started with pastels; what is aerial perspective; landscape sky; water in the landscape; the integrated landscape: sky and water together. This book serves an important purpose because so many pastelists are landscape artists, and while one would think it's easiest to ruin a field, trees, or flowers, the sky sets the mood for the whole painting and the water usually reflects whatever is in the sky to some extent. It's important to get a handle on these aspects early on in order to paint effectively and beautifully. By starting with the basics such as figuring out the composition, teaching you about tones and values, and the importance of an underpainting, this book is a great primer course on creating a successful painting. After establishing the basics, it takes the reader through a variety of different skies (clear, starry, sunset, etc.) and water (still, moving, falling, waves, etc.) There are sections throughout which illustrate something painted correctly versus actual incorrect examples. This is the first book I've found which offers these helpful gems. There are several demonstrations throughout as well, but bear in mind that these step-by-step pictures are going to be too basic for a lot of beginners.There's a learning curve to pastel which most books can't successfully navigate. This book comes as close as most books can to helping with that learning curve. The fact is, someone who is advanced beginner or intermediate will glean far more from this book than a rank beginner. A book can't really teach you how to make the marks you want to make. Painting takes lots of dedication, experimentation, and practice. The author is most assuredly not giving away her painting secrets in this book; she's giving the reader knowledge about painting realistic skies and waters. This book is very thorough, and it covers a gap in pastel books which sorely needed filling. Although I hesitate to speak too glowingly of any art how-to book, I think I can confidently say that out of the twenty or so books I own on pastel, this is hand's down the best.What could be better? For starters, some of the illustrations are black-and-white sketches or notans. This could be off-putting to some, but with some experience under my belt now, they were helpful to me. The step-by-step demonstrations, as mentioned above, give you an idea of how to paint, but they won't show you how to layer color by color to make a beautiful, interesting painting; that work is left up to you by carefully studying each step. The book's paper is simply unfortunate. The cheap matte paper used in the paperback kills some details of the painting process which would be more noticeable on thick, glossy paper.With reasonable expectations about what you are buying and some prior knowledge, this pastel book is a must-have. Recommended.

The boook was delivered in record time in excellent shaped. Excellent, intelligent pa kagong.The book is brilliant for beginners through advanced pastelists.

Very helpful landscape painting book and the pictures are beautiful. I learned a lot and it was fun to do the exercises.

YES, this book is worth purchasing. It is a brilliant book offering you great instruction, insight and inspiration using pastels. The author starts out telling you how to get started in pastels, and goes way, way beyond that. A book for all levels. Techniques are shown and described. Value studies, simplifying shapes, underpainting techniques, painting mood, and lots more.THE SKY sets the mood in a painting, and the author,Liz Haywood-Sullivan fully explains the importance of the sky in the landscape. She uses photos of her beautiful pastels with clear descriptive wording. Photos show the wrong way and the right way to do cloud formations. Liz shows how to apply clouds to the sky in step by step instructions; tells you what blues are best to use, how to paint the changing light and changeable sky,the drama of sunrise and sunset skies, and moonlit skies.WATER is often in landscape paintings and if you wish to learn how to do water well in a landscape painting, then this book will explain and show you how to do it well. Again, there are photos showing the wrong way and the right way of painting believable reflections in the water and aerial perspective. Find out how to paint water from still water, moving water,falling water, the ocean, as well as painting fog, painting rain,transparency in water. Gorgeous photos of her work in the book telling also what type of pastel papers or boards were used and pastels.Don't miss out on this book and what you can learn from the author.

I very rarely leave reviews on books, but this demanded that. I am a graphic designer (now retired) but my passion has been painting (acrylic, oil and now pastel) for more years that I would ever admit. I have a vast collection of art instruction books on all media mentioned above. I have recently decided to "reteach" myself pastel since it has been many, many years since I have used it. Within the last 6 months I would say I have purchased at least 12 used books on pastel. I bought this one on a whim, thinking it wouldn't amount to much other than some "sissy" pastel paintings. At last! someone that breaks things down into common sense steps, logically explaining and showing why things are done. There was such practical advice as sketching shapes in when beginning in one shade darker than the paper color being used. Quite obvious, but easily overlooked in that initial 'rush' to get started. I would recommend this book for every level of painter-you cannot go wrong. I would hope you enjoy it as much as I have! Thanks for reading my thoughts-

This is an amazing book..so many aha! moments. The art is stunning and the technical advice is very in-depth but accessable. Would recommend.

There are so many painting instruction books that is often hard to know which ones are really worth your time.Most of the pastel instruction books give the same identical instructions upon choosing pastels and papers, and then present various scenes in stages of completion.So few actually give instructions on how complete original works of your own. Planning a composition, planning a colour scheme, the actual strokes in pastel. I've been working in pastel for years but this gave me a lot to think about; there is always more to learn.

This is a great book and there is much valuable info in it for the pastellist but why did the editors not pick up on the author's assertion that the cloud goes behind the moon. Apart from that glitch she is very good on the aestheric and technical side. I would recommend this book to anybody wanting a book on pastel.

Came in good condition and is a very interesting book about the use of pastels. A must for someone who is interested in what you can achieve with pastels. Very impressive, shown it to some other artists who also thought it a very interesting book.

A very good book on pastel techniques. As a beginner I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed the authors style. Highly recommended.