Painting Brilliant Skies & Water in Pastel: Secrets to bringing light and life to your landscapes

As a beginner I have found this to be a useful learning resource

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.

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.

Excellent merci