Full of easy-to-follow exercises and demonstrations, the Collins You Can Paint series should give even the most hesitant of beginners the enthusiasm and confidence to start sketching in a variety of media. All the instruction is broken down into easy step-by-step exercises to help you to practise and build up your knowledge and expertise of sketching in different media. For example, you learn how to sketch a tree in three stages, then a cloudy sky and finally how to sketch a simple foreground, so that in the end you can sketch a complete landscape. In this book Jackie Simmonds takes the reader by the hand with simple exercises and explains exactly how to sketch a range of different subjects, so that by the end of the book you feel that you can really produce a sketch to be proud of in a variety of different media. Sketching media covered include: graphite pencil and charcoal, Conte and pastel pencils, watercolour soluble pencils and crayons, pen and ink markers and felt-tips.

Jackie Simmonds is a successful artist and author with several art instruction books to her name, including Pastels Workshop and Learn to Paint Gardens in Pastels (both HarperCollins) and Pastel Workbook. She is a Pastel Society award winner and has made six teaching videos on painting.