Painting Skies in Pastel by Sandra Orme

Painting Skies in Pastel by Sandra Orme is a fantastic guide to creating dramatic clouds and atmospheric skyscapes using soft pastels. It’s the ideal book for beginners as it helps build a foundation of skills enabling you to create your own convincing skies. Whether it’s glowing, rich sunsets or bright clouds on a blustery day.

Both practical and inspiring, this title by Sandra Orme offers great insight into her practice and teaches a complete course in soft pastel painting fundamentals. You’ll learn the key aspects of colour that are so important to creating an atmospheric sky; from how to retain vibrancy to avoiding muddy colour mixes.

Work along to a series of step-by-step projects, each of which focuses on a particular technique or effect. Each project is complemented by a series of photographs both before and after blending for added clarity. The book finishes with the ‘Sky Clinic’ section, offering more specialist and technical help to solve some of the problems you might encounter.

Painting Skies in Pastel includes all the specifics you’ll need to know to get started with soft pastel painting - whether it’s how to hold your pastel, mark making techniques, blending and more. Sandra goes into her teaching assuming no prior knowledge but includes plenty of insights that would be valuable to even the most confident artist.

Please note that the techniques taught in this book aren’t suitable for use with hard, oil or wax pastels.

128 page paperback. 216 x 280mm.

Look Inside

Introduction 6

What do you need? 8

Pastels and colour 26

Painting skies 34

Blue sky, white clouds 36

Cloudburst 48

Windy Weather 60

Vivid Sunset 72

Stormy Sunset 84

Delicate Sunrise 96

The pastel sky clinic 108

Index 128

Sandra Orme is renowned for her ability to capture dramatic skies and a sense of place. From her studio in the heart of the Peak District in Buxton, Derbyshire, she explores the ever-changing sky and landscape.

‘Nothing can be beautiful that is not true’ wrote John Ruskin, a sentiment that Sandra uses as her inspiration as she seeks to recreate the beauty of dramatic skies and moorland vistas. Inspired by the grand landscape tradition from JMW Turner to Alexander Nasmyth, Sandra applies contemporary pastel and charcoal methods to develop epic representational works that convey the terrible beauty of wild open spaces.

Sandra has a degree in Fine Art and many years experience as an art teacher and tutor. She regularly exhibits at both local and national shows as well as galleries, and has exhibited with The Pastel Society at The Mall Galleries in London. Sandra is a member of the art collective, Peak District Artisans, and has contributed to SAA and The Artist magazines. Sandra is also an associate artist with Unison Colour, with her own sets of sky pastels. Sandra has a website, www.sandraorme.com, with online video tutorials. She is active on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.