At first glance this book seems rudimentary enough for anyone. However, after working through some tutorials I got annoyed with the vagueness of the instructions. It's like it assumed steps and didn't mention half of them. You really may as well not read the book and instead study the images of each step, and then work from the final with the others in mind, because there's a lot of undoing in between the example stages. Probably picking a layer, use fixative, then come back for another layer would have been the most effective choice to in any way imitate what the author has--pastels by themselves just don't hold the layers the way the demonstrations in this book imply. ( )

This book is very helpful to the beginning worker in pastels. It covers the basics very well and I would recommend it to a beginning painter looking for basic information.