Book Description

Discover the art of coloured pencils and improve your drawing skills with this easy-to-use guide.

Discover the art of coloured pencils and improve your drawing skills with this easy-to-use guide. Step-by-step instructions guide you through a range of blending, mark-making and mixed media techniques to improve your drawing skills and introduce you to a range of new effects. This book includes a comprehensive guide to colour and composition, and all the tools, materials and equipment you need to capture a range of subjects, from still-life studies to holiday sketching and portraiture. A gallery of inspirational works from other artists and an image bank of copyright-free photographs mean you can get started straight away.

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Book Contents

Prelims, Introduction, Tools and materials, Techniques and tips, Artist's methodologies, Photographic resource, Glossary, resources, index and credits

Reviews

artbookreview.net
July 08 Coloured pencils have always been the Cinderella of art materials. They’re the things we give children, that we buy cheaply by the box because they don’t make too much mess and they don’t require hours of preparation and cleaning up afterwards (the pencils; children do that all by themselves). So we put them aside when we grow up and become Proper Artists and move on to the serious matter of oils and watercolours. And maybe pastels. Graphic designers are not so constrained, however. Having a job to do, they’ll use any tool that gets it done and they have driven the development of ranges of artist and designer quality pencils that can hold their head up with any other medium. And that has, in its turn, spawned the occasional book that shows you just what you can achieve if you just believe. Put all these innovative ideas together with a proven and excellent series and you have the perfect guide for both the beginner and more experienced artist alike.

Leisure Painter
Oct 08 A colourful and well designed reference book packed full of ideas and information that will help improve your skills. Jane begins with a useful chapter on tools and materials before introducing us to an impressive range of techniques – everything from dry mark-making to blending with solvents, impressing, sgraffito and burnishing. These techniques are complemented by information and advice on aspects such as masking, erasing, rectifying mistakes and underpainting, and they are followed by equally good chapters on colour, planning and themed palettes (guidelines for colours and colour mixes for various subjects). The book concludes with an inspirational gallery of artists' work plus ideas for different types of subject matter, with tips on how to tackle them. As this excellent book shows, coloured pencils are a surprisingly versatile medium, suiting both drawing and painting techniques, either on their own or in a mixed-media approach. They are equally appropriate for the newcomer, as they are for the professional artist seeking highly sophisticated results.

www.jeanniezelos.com
June 08 I asked to review this book having been introduced recently to coloured pencils, and finding very few books on the market. First think to say is its a hard back book and spiral bound which makes it very useful when painting as it can be laid flat without that annoying habit of pages flipping over just when you're trying to concentrate. It has seven sections, each one concentrating on a specific subject. Its starts, as you 'd expect with an overview of materials available and what types of paper are suitable. I've bought the water-soluble pencils, which the book explains are slightly waxy, and provide a high degree of variations but the more intricate details are best done by a finer pencil - non water-soluble. The author suggests a combination of both for the greatest flexibility of effects. Under the essential tools section Jane suggests a basic palette of colours, useful for anyone wanting to try the medium without expending a large outlay. I found the Techniques section really interesting and learned several new techniques, some of which I can use with other mediums. Jane explains how the grip the artists uses for his pencil will affect the final mark making and how to manipulate this to best effect. This is explained next via a double page of 16 small images each showing a series of different markings and brief explanation of how to achieve them. Its a quick and simple visual comment and very clear to understand. Following this there's a good section on blending, crosshatching and blending with solvents, along with burnishing, sgraffito and impressing. I hadn't seen a clear explanation of impressing and can see how effective it is on the example images. The section on colour is useful for artists in any medium, but the tip of keeping pencils in a range from warm to cool tones is an excellent idea. Jane gives some clear examples of different styles of work using pencils - I especially liked the two artists using the same image but different styles to complete a work. Further on Jane gives advice on how to use photographs and what to do with the colours and tonal effects to get the best image. She gives a very useful suggestion of colours and colour mixes beside each photograph. The Gallery has an amazing range of coloured pencils works showing by the different styles, just how versatile this medium can be. Its good to have something to aspire to. The last section in the book is a useful collection of copyright free images - very useful for those raring to get started having read this book. This is an excellent reference book for the coloured pencil artists , containing much valuable information and is a book you will refer back to time and time again, such is the wealth of information it contains.