Cecile Baird's Painting Light with Colored Pencil is chock full of inspiration and instruction in its 128 pages. After an introduction to composition and lighting the author delves into instructing the reader on how to create fruit and flowers that glow. She then spends a chapter on how to capture light on water. The final chapters have 7 step-by-step demonstrations on how to use the techniques she discussed in the earlier chapters.

The author has the easiest teaching on how to produce light in your colored pencil paintings that I have ever seen in a colored pencil instruction book. However, she shows you how to do it in demonstrations with Prismacolor pencils which I no longer use. Prismacolor was sold to a company based in Mexico 5 years ago and quality control was eliminated. The pencil casings were made thinner and with cheaper wood. The pigments are still the best but when they are encased in a wood pencil that breaks too easily they are not worth using. If you are not an experienced colored pencil user you may find it difficult to substitute pencils from better brands that will get you the same results that the author is trying to teach you.

One thing the author gets right is adding demonstrations on working with metal, glass, and wood subjects as well as in draping fabric. These topics are usually in separate books or DVDs and here we are lucky to have them all in one place which is a great value for the reader. One new skill that I will take away from this book is how to create fabric folds. This will be useful in portraits as well as in still lifes that have fabric in them.

Painting Light with Colored Pencil is a good resource for the colored pencil artist. ( )