Creating Textures in Colored Pencil
Gary Greene
North Light Books
Nonfiction, Art
**
Description
A detailed book on the recently emerging medium of the artist-quality colored pencil, with numerous step-by-step examples and several finished images.
Review
I've done a little work with colored pencils, and think they're a medium with a lot of potential. One plus, for me, is that they can be used
without a whole bunch of accessories. Since I do most of my artwork sitting on a couch in the living room, I don't have room for paint cans or
brushes and stuff I took a class once from the author, and was impressed by the possibilities of colored pencil. Being transparent, they can be used
over pre-existing pencil or pen work, the latter being what I do most. So, I bought this book to see what else I could do with them. Now, I'm a little
scared to open the box of artist-grade pencils I bought to experiment with. (In pencils especially, the cheapie-grade materials work so differently
from the real thing that they aren't even worth picking up for experimentation.)
Maybe it’s just because I've had so little practice in color theory (and art in general), but I find that this book glosses over many things. In other
media, colors are mixed on a palette, so you can fiddle around with it before putting it on the canvas. In colored pencil, colors are "mixed" on the
paper through layering. If you mess up, there’s almost nothing to be done about it. Without an imbibed eraser strip on an electric eraser (it looks a
little like a dremel), there’s no way to get the stuff off, and even then paper damage is almost a given. Greene has many step-by-step drawings and
beautiful end results, but gives no hint on how he picked the colors or how to get the same texture effect with different things. I got far more out
of Claudia Nice's watercolor books than I did out of this. Too technical for me, thank you.