Leisure Painter, November 2023
Aimed at beginners and those with some experience, Sandra Orme's Painting Skies in Pastel is a practical and inspiring book that serves a complete course in working with pastels. Each of the stage-by-stage projects focuses upon a particular sky effect, with clear images describing every step of the journey.
There's plenty of general practical advice on using pastels from an artist renowned for her dramatic skyscapes from how to hold the pastel itself to make the marks you want, to which surface to use and how to blend and layer colours. Sandra's paintings throughout are sure to inspire you.
The Artist, Issue 139
It's always good when specific compositional elements and what we might call the minor media come together. It betokens a maturity of art instruction as well as a willingness of publishers to take a risk. And this was one risk certainly worth taking. Rather than being a short chapter, here skies get a whole book to themselves with everything from placid to dramatic fully covered.
After the usual introduction to materials, Sandra gets to the meat of the subject with six detailed demonstrations, starting with a blue sky fronted by fluffy white clouds which have real substance due to careful use of shading. From here, we move on to the more dramatic, with a cloudburst darkening the sky and obscuring part of the foreground. Further chapters cover wind, sunset and a sunrise. This is an impressively thought-thorough work that covers a good variety of situations and builds your skills progressively.
