Maggie Price

This book is an instructional text for pastels. It’s focus is an using light and shadow to create form, addressing different lighting and shadow conditions. The author specifically addresses the predominant sky conditions, sunny, cloudy and rain. She also talks about color under these conditions, reflections and shadows. In each, the changes of color are discussed addressing the conditions affecting the light color and intensity.

Each section starts with a detailed description of what is going on with the light and why. Then proceeds to a number of step-by-step painting instructions that you can work through.

In addition, the paintings used as reference are very good, after working through the book, it still serves as a nice book to flip through for the images.

A few of the work-through paintings are done by different artist, giving a fuller study than the author (presumably) could provide on her own.

Although some of the instruction was rather obvious, I still enjoyed reading through the comments and the example paintings.… (altro)