Oil Pastel for the Serious Beginner: Basic Lessons in Becoming a Good Painter Paperback – Illustrated, September 10, 2014

Loved reading this book. Great tips for the person wanting to know more about this medium. Beautiful artwork to inspire. Eeanore Alter

This book is a very good book expressly devoted to oil pastels-but that said, in comparison with the only other book on the subject that I know of, it is a distant second. (There are a couple other obscure ones which I haven't seen) My favorite is "Oil Pastel: Materials & Techniques For Today's Artist", by Kenneth Leslie, 1990, Watson-Guptill Pub. Because it is out of print & only available second hand at inflated prices, unless Amazon can bring it back in print, or you are prepared to pay inflated prices (for something you cannot see & evaluate for yourself in advance), we are left with the book by Elliot.Elliot covers a moderate (compared with Leslie!) amount of basic info & gives you a look at the oil pastel works of other artists as well--something I consider very important, especially if the author's work doesn't grab you, & also because you get to see how other sensibilities handle the medium. And he gives a taste of the history of oil pastels; he talks about various papers, etc; he mentions only two brands: Sennelier & Holbein (both premier brands) but there are others he does not mention which are evaluated in Kenneth Leslie's book. Leslie gives you a ton of facts & ideas: shows you how to make your own oil pastels if you desire, & how to prepare paper, etc., for receiving oil pastels (whose oil content can deteriorate paper) & lots of other info very useful for anyone wishing to know technical stuff about the medium.Elliot's book is a good companion to the one by Kenneth Leslie, & I consider myself fortunate to have both. But if you could only choose one, & it were available, I would choose Kenneth Leslie's book!

An honest and excellent book for both beginner and professional artists alike! I have gone back to this book several times as a reference for my art work over time. If you are looking for a book which will tell you what you will need to start out with oil pastels (and what is safe based on where you do your art work), the Oil Pastel for the Serious Beginner book will most certainly help you out!

exploring this exciting book will be challenging for me to learn to use oil pastels. application has created a quandry for me. with the knowledge "in oil pastel for the beginner." and the little i know i am expecting to achieve another medium. i also purchased a copy for my friend so to-gether we can explore. thanking you,margaret mcguinness

There's a seriously frustrating lack of information about how to use oil pastels; which is such a beautiful medium. This book only adds to that frustration.This book is more like the author's portable portfolio. Mostly a lot of photos of his paintings with a very small paragraphs describing the photo.For example, there's literally a photo of marks on paper with a small paragraph that says these are examples of different marks you can make. No instructions on how to make them, or technique of how to apply them or what situation to use them in. But then, here's several pages of fully finished paintings I made where I used some of these marks I mentioned. Um...Ok. That's like a NASA engineer saying: I use math and make calculations with formulas. Now here's some photos of a fully built carbon composite wing we made using my calculations. Not helpful! Even as an experienced artist, the book wouldn't be useful. Let alone a serious beginner.I bought it used for about $10 and that was still too much. I don't even want to keep it in my library as a reference it's that bad. I literally have no use for this book.

I almost never write a review of a product I don't like and art books very rarely fit into that category. The content of this book is, for the most part, not bad, though the author dwells far too long on simply showing his own work, with no detailed focus on the underlying principles and techniques used to produce oil pastel paintings. The book is mostly comprised of example after example of the author's own paintings, with descriptions of visual elements and explanations of his aesthetic choices. There is a nice section at the beginning of the book about materials. There is a little section about warming up and learning practice strokes which can be helpful. The author spends a lot of time on mixed-media techniques later in the text, but I'm not a fan of mixed-media and, besides, the explanations and examples of these seem far too rudimentary to be of any real use.I will mention, too, that the softcover edition that I purchased looks very much like a print-on-demand or self-published title. The paper is not gloss or semi-gloss; it is as matte and absorbent as any sheet of common copy paper, only a little more durable. The pictures of the author's work vary greatly in quality throughout the book, ranging from positively "worn-out office color copier" grade to sort of acceptable. Some of the images are pretty grainy and some are just washed out, but none that I can tell are sharp and saturated (as you will find in most other art instruction books). Even Daniel E. Greene's "Pastel - A Comprehensive Guide to Pastel Painting," which is quite an old title, includes terrific high-gloss, saturated reproductions as 'plates' among its more numerous black and white images.It is very dissapointing that this book is not very useful, or even enjoyable to thumb through (as so many art instruction books are). The main reason for this dissapointment is that there are very few books to be had about oil pastel technique and theory. What is needed is an oil pastel instruction book with the same quality standards and inspirational attention to detail that is found in works about soft pastels by, say, Bill Creevy, Daniel E. Greene, Ellen Eagle, Allen Flattmann, Albert Handell, and many others.