Colored Pencil Painting Portraits: Master a Revolutionary Method for Rendering Depth and Imitating Life - Softcover

Nickelsen, Alyona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385346271 ISBN 13: 9780385346276

Publisher: Watson-Guptill, 2017

Synopsis

Colored pencil painter Alyona Nickelsen reveals how to use the medium to push the limits of realistic portraiture.

Colored Pencil Painting Portraits provides straightforward solutions to the problems that artists face in creating lifelike images, and will prime readers on the intricacies of color, texture, shadow, and light as they interplay with the human form. In this truly comprehensive guide packed with step-by-step demonstrations, Nickelsen considers working from photo references versus live models; provides guidance on posing and lighting, as well as planning and composing a work; discusses tools, materials, and revolutionary layering techniques; and offers lessons on capturing gesture and expression and on rendering facial and body features of people of all age groups and skin tones.

About this title

About the Author

ALYONA NICKELSEN is a contributing writer for Colored Pencil magazine and the author of Colored Pencil Painting Bible. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including American Artist, The Artist's Magazine, and American Art Collector. Nickelsen's paintings have been exhibited and won awards in prestigious national and international juried shows, such as Salmagundi Club, the American Artist Professional League, Audubon Artists, and the Colored Pencil Society of America. She is the creator and instructor of the Colored Pencil Painting Learning Center hosted on her website, www.brushandpencil.com.

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From the Introduction:

The colored pencils in my studio are amazingly resilient. They have successfully outlasted the many temptations presented by paints, pastels, inks, etc., and, umpteen years later, still hold the preferred position on my work table. I have used the vast quantity of accumulated knowledge about the properties of other mediums and incorporated the more useful ones to further advance and extend the benefits of the colored pencil painting process.

Through continuous research, experiments, and testing, the exceptionality of the colored pencil medium has become clear to me. Their precision and flexibility allows artists to achieve practically any desired effect. We simply need to understand their much overlooked properties and use them to our own advantage. As a result, even the sometimes cumbersome task of covering a large background is no longer a chore. If you know how, you can overcome such challenges in just a fraction of the time you may have come to expect.

In this book we continue the discussion started in Colored Pencil Painting Bible about the colored pencil painting process. However, this time it will be based on the example of the portrait genre. Since the publication of my first book some of the techniques I use today have been updated or modified, some tools were added and others abandoned, and some ideas have been adopted or rejected. But the fundamentals of my approach remain the same. I continue layering colored pencils onto a white surface producing finished artwork that resembles a painting rather than a drawing. We will be discussing all aspects of these practices in detail throughout the pages of this work.

Edition details

• Publisher: Watson-Guptill
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385346271
• ISBN 13: 9780385346276
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192