Also up on this site, you can find reviews of John Barber’s two previous books in this series, The Watercolor Wheel Book and The Oil Paint Color Wheel Book. Now, here is a third volume, this time showing you how to use your pastels. How these books differ from ordinary color wheel theory books is that they actually have a wheel on the cover that you can rotate and align to see what you get if you mix two colors together.

Maybe you are thinking that because pastels are in stick form rather than liquid you do not actually mix them, but you do—just in a different way. Like the other two titles this book is aimed mostly at the beginner to pastels, telling you the basics and then giving you a few projects to work through. Learn how to blend the colors together to make new shades, as well as different ways of doing this, and of applying the color. These are SOFT pastels by the way, not the oil variety and the instructions and projects really bring out the soft, gentle tones of these chalky, tactile crayons. This book also contains a section on how to use the color wheel on the cover, as well as the inevitable early chapter on what you need to buy if you want to take up this hobby in a full-blown manner. This includes the different forms pastels come in and how they differ. The rest of the book is filled with projects, which show you in a number of stages how to create a certain picture while teaching you a couple of new techniques each time, which are helpfully listed underneath. I like the way the pastels you need are also listed, and the lesson you are learning is explained first, before you start on the picture. The pictures depict a winter sunset, cliffs in sunlight, a still life, flower study, seascapes and more. As with the other titles in this series this is a good book for any beginner or improver.