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"Colored Pencil Painting Bible": A Review
15 years ago
A few months ago a commenter got me thinking about colored pencils books. I hadn't done a search for them in almost ten years. It didn't occur to me since i was happily doing my own thing with them. I read them books a decade ago and they hardly ever had animals, what else could I possibly learn?
Every time a thought like that occurs, it's time to go looking. An artist should never be satisfied with, stuck, like that. Techniques for pots and pans can be applied to feathers and fur.
So off to Amazon I went! "Colored Pencil books". Search. And at the very top sits the title The Colored Pencil Painting Bible: Techniques for Achieving Luminous Color and Ultrarealistic Effects by Alyona Nickelsen. That's quite a mouthful! But hey the reviews have it ranked with damn near five our of five stars. I read the customer reviews, checked out the demonstration videos, and found the artist's website: http://www.brushandpencil.com/
There is a lot of good stuff on the website itself for freeeeeee if you'd like to check it out. I wanted more, so I bought the book direct from the artist. It came signed with some CDs and paper samples. COOL.
I've been browsing and experimenting with some various techniques ever since. Her writing is concise, easy to understand, and very informative. I was overjoyed to see how a lot of her techniques are similar to mine but taken much further. I've been using Turpenoid for 10 years now, and she too uses a solvent, odorless mineral spirits, to dissolve the wax binder and push pigment around. My pigment pushing is a lot rougher than her treatment, so I tried out some of her gentler tapping with a cotton swab instead of scrubbing with a brush. Neat results! I sometimes use powdered pencil, but it was inefficient. She solves that problem in an ingenious way.
I've been struggling with mixing color for a long time now. Like all mediums, each color, or pigment, has it's own properties that react in different ways with other pigments and solvents. I sometimes try to document what the different pigment properties do so I can make better art. Mrs. Nickelsen discusses some of this and more. She provides instructions to create beautiful glowing colors with careful layering and subtle solvent washes. She even uses the colorless blender, which I stopped using much when I turned to Turpenoid. I'm using it again these days.
One of the few things I don't like about this book is the "magic step" between steps. That is, there is a step 1, then step 2, and then BAM the art is done. Often I'm left going wait…wait what? Someone did some sort of magic to turn this grainy mess to a smooth, crisp image. However, if you read the text carefully and flip back and forth between steps you AND think about the lessons in the book, you can make out what has happened. Maybe. It's not easy.
For that reason I do not recommend this book to novices. If you have an ok grasp on colored pencil colors and layer effects, I highly recommend this book. The novice may have some trouble, and I recommend checking out the website first.
Overall, I am very happy I made this purchase. She makes good on her promise for luminous color and the oodles of practical advice for everything else is invaluable.
Once again, the website is http://www.brushandpencil.com/
Back to coloring wolf fur for me, cheers yawl!
Every time a thought like that occurs, it's time to go looking. An artist should never be satisfied with, stuck, like that. Techniques for pots and pans can be applied to feathers and fur.
So off to Amazon I went! "Colored Pencil books". Search. And at the very top sits the title The Colored Pencil Painting Bible: Techniques for Achieving Luminous Color and Ultrarealistic Effects by Alyona Nickelsen. That's quite a mouthful! But hey the reviews have it ranked with damn near five our of five stars. I read the customer reviews, checked out the demonstration videos, and found the artist's website: http://www.brushandpencil.com/
There is a lot of good stuff on the website itself for freeeeeee if you'd like to check it out. I wanted more, so I bought the book direct from the artist. It came signed with some CDs and paper samples. COOL.
I've been browsing and experimenting with some various techniques ever since. Her writing is concise, easy to understand, and very informative. I was overjoyed to see how a lot of her techniques are similar to mine but taken much further. I've been using Turpenoid for 10 years now, and she too uses a solvent, odorless mineral spirits, to dissolve the wax binder and push pigment around. My pigment pushing is a lot rougher than her treatment, so I tried out some of her gentler tapping with a cotton swab instead of scrubbing with a brush. Neat results! I sometimes use powdered pencil, but it was inefficient. She solves that problem in an ingenious way.
I've been struggling with mixing color for a long time now. Like all mediums, each color, or pigment, has it's own properties that react in different ways with other pigments and solvents. I sometimes try to document what the different pigment properties do so I can make better art. Mrs. Nickelsen discusses some of this and more. She provides instructions to create beautiful glowing colors with careful layering and subtle solvent washes. She even uses the colorless blender, which I stopped using much when I turned to Turpenoid. I'm using it again these days.
One of the few things I don't like about this book is the "magic step" between steps. That is, there is a step 1, then step 2, and then BAM the art is done. Often I'm left going wait…wait what? Someone did some sort of magic to turn this grainy mess to a smooth, crisp image. However, if you read the text carefully and flip back and forth between steps you AND think about the lessons in the book, you can make out what has happened. Maybe. It's not easy.
For that reason I do not recommend this book to novices. If you have an ok grasp on colored pencil colors and layer effects, I highly recommend this book. The novice may have some trouble, and I recommend checking out the website first.
Overall, I am very happy I made this purchase. She makes good on her promise for luminous color and the oodles of practical advice for everything else is invaluable.
Once again, the website is http://www.brushandpencil.com/
Back to coloring wolf fur for me, cheers yawl!
In retrospect I can understand why all the intervening steps were never shown (instead of just three pages there would have been a hundred and twenty pages with a prohibitive increase in the book's cost).
At the time I was always frustrated by that magical jump between a page of quickly sketched circles, squares, a few wiggly lines followed by a full-color picture of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Luckily there was a half-hour television show of an artist (Torah Banks) at the time who went through all the steps on-screen every week and bridged that magic jump for me.
Today, mercifully, there are CDs and video downloads for beginning artists that do the same thing.