The Pastel Book: Materials and Techniques for Today's Artist

by Bill Creevy

Absolutely the most thorough guide to pastel materials and techniques ever assembled in a single volume, this is the book for anyone working with pastels, from beginners to experienced artists looking to develop more professional skills.

Defining the pastel medium broadly—color in stick form to be used for drawing and painting simultaneously—the author creates works of sensuous textures and colors, ranging from subtle to intense. He uses traditional soft and hard pastels, as well as oil pastels and oil sticks, showing the effects produced by each in step-by-step demonstrations. Included are sophisticated ways to combine pastels with water, acrylic, alkyd gels, and oil paint for stunning mixed-media results.

Genres: Art, How To

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

Reviews

[Gina Lento · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having met Bill in person, I can say the demos in the book are just like the demos in person. Bill has a whole different way of working with pastels that blazed the trail and legitimized pastels as another form of painting instead of it being used as a sketching medium.

[Donna Mallery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is good book on explaining many uses of pastels. I did a couple of the examples in this book, and they turned out good. My only complaint is that the step by step examples weren’t detailed enough. It is definitely worth checking out at your library to see if it is worth it to you. There aren’t enough pastel books to choose from so I think this one is fairly high on the list of options.

[Wayne Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Describes each kind of pastel and clearly demonstrates use of each.

[Elaine Langer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me nostalgic to read about Pearl Paint in NYC. Great book about technique and how go use pastel.

[Makingamark · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very first books about pastels that I ever read. An intelligent approach to the subject - and some very good demonstrations

Read my detailed review on my blog Book Review: The Pastel Book - summary as follows

An introduction to pastels which is methodical in its approach and comprehensive in its scope. It provides very high quality advice about materials and stimulating demonstrations of what can be achieved in terms of basic techniques, the use of colour and mixing pastels with other media. The explanations and images are excellent and the instruction is stimulating.

Suitable for: Beginners, intermediate and advanced artists using pastels who want to understand the medium better and to explore what's possible when using pastels. Likely to appeal to those who prefer a painterly approach to realism.

A book that has made a lasting impression on me and opened my eyes to what is possible using soft pastels. This book is a "standard" in art instruction which attracts positive comments from a variety of sources. So far as I'm aware its not yet been beaten in terms of the comprehensive nature of its coverage of different brands of pastels and the range of ways you can use pastels to make art.

[Natashya KitchenPuppies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well organized and presented book on painting with pastels. He shows all sorts of techniques for chalk pastels, and includes working with oil pastels and pastels with mixed media.
I'd give it 5 stars, but it is 20 years old and some of the materials are not up to date.
Great book though.

[Marie-pierre Stien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not particularly useful. Forget the book, get the pastels out and start drawing.