Painting Skies In Pastel, Sandra Orme – Book Review

I have lots of different excuses for getting new art instruction books. I get books for my birthday and at Christmas. But sometimes I buy them myself. This could be because a book is going cheap, because my wishlist looking too long, because the number of books on my wishlist isn’t divisible by four or five (a bit OCD, I know), because I think I deserve a treat or because I feel like I’ve not been learning enough recently. A few days ago, though, I bought a couple of new books for the best reason of all, which is that I needed them.

First up is this one by Sandra Orme, a 128 page paperback. I don’t feel like I’m quite there yet with the soft pastels and need to learn more about using them. And with a set of sky colours making up 25% of my collection, it felt to me that if I could master skies in soft pastel, I could quickly get into creating some decent sky paintings: paintings where the sky the star and a little Bibbit sea or land at the bottom feels like an afterthought. So I bought this book rather than the general book on pastels or the book on pastel landscapes that are also on my wishlist.

This book feels more like one long story than a series of chapters, but if I had to divide it up, I’d say that there’s 36 pages of buildup, 74 pages of demos and 18 pages of extras on various problems the reader might come across. I’ll go through each of these in turn.

The 36 pages of buildup starts with the usual woolly introduction, before going in to equipment, mark making (both pastel marks and smoothing), a five stage process for painting skies and some important stuff on how many and what sort of colours to use. It’s a 36 page passage that sneaks up on you. You think that a lot of this stuff will just be going through the motions but it really isn’t. In just the first few pages I’m reading about a type of paper surface that holds the pastel without needing fixative. Six pages are taken up by mark making, detailing six different types of mark, all accompanied by clear photos of how to hold the pastel and of the resulting marks. This is something that fully deserves to be spread out over six pages. The five step process talks about what to pick out in a sky in each stage, what sort of marks to make, how to smooth them (finger, hand or colour shaper? And how much pressure?). And the stuff on colours isn’t about which colours we should buy; it’s about how to choose the colours to paint with.

We then get to the middle section, which is a series of six demonstrations of sky paintings. Three of these are blue skies with white clouds and three are more colourful, with two sunsets and a sunrise. Each demo is twelve pages long and divided into the five steps described earlier. Each step within each demo includes clear photos of the painting after the colour marks have gone down and after they’ve been smoothed out. It makes it easy to refresh the memory by just looking at the photos. The demos all back up the ideas described in the five step process that appeared earlier in the book and help everything click together. It’s also a well chosen set of six skies to paint. The demos are worded as instructional rather than demonstrations but, to be honest, the broad process is something that I’d be following anyway, so it’s not as if I’d diverge that far away from what Sandra’s doing anyway.

And finally we get to the section in how to deal with various problems. Apart from the bit on how to correct mistakes (very useful), ist of this seems to be on getting the edges of the clouds right. It feels like a lot of this could have been covered within the demos. But the more I think about it, the more I’m happy to see this stuff tagged on at the end. Adding this stuff into the demos wouldn’t just have made them all longer, it would also have made them repetitive. I’m happy to see these techniques effectively moved to an appendix so that the demos can be more concise and easier to map to the five step process.

So, yes, I’m more than happy with this one. It feels like a great second book after Rebecca De Mendonca before digging into super advanced books. And there’s a lot of beginner level stuff in here that I learned that I didn’t pick up from Rebecca. Lots around materials, pressure and colours. In fact, I’m going to recommend that a new pastel artist buys both this book and Rebecca’s. They complement each other well. This book also leaves me hungry to start putting its ideas into practice, which is always a good sign.

At one point, this book had a five palette rating. But after reading Robert Brindley’s book and putting his ideas into practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that this book introduced me to a couple of bad habits: doing too much smoothing with both fingers and colour shapers and going in with firm marks too early. Now that I’ve read Robert’s book, I feel better equipped to read Sandra’s and to be more selective about what to put into practice. So I’d recommend reading Robert’s book before this one. Still, I’m glad I have this book in my collection, so it’s worth three palettes.

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You can find this book and more reviews of it at Amazon UK here.  As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.