Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Painting Nature in Pastel (Practical Art Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great reference book for anyone interested in pastel painting. It has really helped me improve my pastel skills. It covers materials, color and techniques for every kind of nature subject.

Included are 72 different lessons. Each lesson covers a different topic. Some include handling a detail close up, painting all kinds of water, choosing a focal point, describing diverse textures, & underpainting.

Each lesson contains a color photograph & the artwork in various stages along with written step by step instructions. Some of the artwork subjects include clouds, sunsets, frozen landscapes, desert vistas, & autumn scenes.

Many animals covered include an elk, a swan, a monarch butterfly, & a robin's nest. Moreover, some plants studied include sunflowers, junipers, many trees, & cactus. Mountains, fields, rocks, & a cabin are covered as well.

If you are willing to just float along, Zen-like, with the way the material is presented, you'll be just fine. However, there appear to be no thematic groupings or progression of information in this book. There's working with white, then using a limited value range, then emphasising texture, then monochrome, then a focal point.

It would have been better if it started with how to handle to materials, then how to compose the work, then how to edit the image (simplifying the composition), then form, then color.

If you already know what you are doing, it's a nice book to flip through. If you feel discouraged because you think "it can't be done" when you are looking at some complex pattern in nature or a photo, just look at the illustrations. The artist can handle some pretty dicey things like complex foliage.

The desert scenes, I'd like to say, are yummy. Wonderful. I think that desert scenes are the illustrator's forte. If he or she did a book just on desert painting, I'd get it.

This book was obviously meant for Impressionists. Being a realistic artist, I realized this mistake too late. The pictures and demonstrations had little to no detail, and colors seemed to be often used incorrectly. It was not quite abstract, but it definentaly did not look real. On the other hand, I must admit this is a great book for Impressionists. There are a ton of demonstrations and examples, and it really is, like the title says, a "big book." It covered materials and other basics relatively well. Overall, I am not saying that this is a bad book, this review is simply a warning to realistic artists.

This book was adequate for a beginner learning to paint with pastels.

This is a quite good book to paint different types of landscapes, even I find it is difficult for a person without experience drawing landscapes. I usually draw other kind of things and I'm not bad at all, but with this book it isn't very easier, even it has a lot of drawings and projects, I think it should have more step by step explanations in some of them.

The type of work this artist does in pastels could barely even be called impressionistic. A better word would be "sloppy." I had hoped for some more detailed instruction on how to accomplish realistic renderings of nature, but not only are his color choices inexplicable his drawings are terrible! A better book for how to use pastels is Guy Roddon's "Pastel Painting Techniques." His work is also loosely interpretive, but his instruction in the techniques is longer and more instructive. What I would really like to see is a book that instructs artists on how to achieve *realistic* effects with pastels. I know it can be done!