Coloured Pencil Artist's Drawing Bible: Essential Techniques to Improve Your Skills

Description

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.

As a professional painter and teacher of art, Jane Strother has worked across a wide range of media. She currently teaches workshops on oil pastels, drawing, painting and printmaking, and gives talks and demos about her own work. Jane has won prizes and exhibited widely across the UK. As an illustrator, she has had work published by Saatchi Design, Reader's Digest, Longman, Heinemann, Penguin and Random House.

artbookreview.netColoured 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: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.