Master the Latest Breakthroughs in Colored Pencil Art
If you want to create colorful, radiant works of art, colored pencil and related color media (wax pastels, watercolor pencils, and so on) provide you with limitless options for adding vibrancy to your creations. In The New Colored Pencil, artist and instructor Kristy Ann Kutch guides you through the latest developments in color drawing media with examples of and recommendations for the newest pencil brands, drawing surfaces, and groundbreaking techniques (including using the Grid Method, grating pigments, blending with heat, and more). Supported by step-by-step demonstrations and showcasing inspiring art from some of today’s best colored pencil artists, The New Colored Pencil shows you how to use color theory to your advantage, combine color media, create and enhance textures, and experiment with surfaces to create interesting effects. Whether you use traditional wax-based, or watercolor colored pencils, The New Colored Pencil will take your art to the next level.
The New Colored Pencil is an excellent look into the medium and technique Kristy Ann Kutch perfectly describes as "drawing a painting in color". One can verifiably witness this in some of her own splendid work such as Jan's Birthday Blooms, Mt. St. Helens Rebirth and others throughout the instruction guide. The book is comprised of three main categories of colored pencil art in wax-based traditional, water-soluble and wax pastels, as well as mixtures of such media. Tables of particular paper and pencil collections and their traits allow for the artist to know exactly which product has certain characteristics along with their price range.
Kutch examines the preparation processes of freehand sketching, photograph references and the grid method. It is much appreciative to learn that da Vinci and Dürer employed this latter technique. A crucial segment for any artist, especially within the field of colored pencils, is understanding negative space and, moreover, color theory. Comprehending the color wheel with primary, secondary and overlapping complimentary colors are provided through values, saturation, temperature, contrast and combinations.
Procedures are outlined elaborating on Brillo strokes, cross-hatching and pointillism. A couple of ultra intriguing concepts are the option and utilization of real wood paper, sgraffito, Aquabord, blending with heat, spattering backgrounds, and grating pigments from pencils with a mesh screen.
The author covers a surprisingly wide variety of erasing with different ways of omitting errors and unwanted markings, such as with white vinyl, vanish, battery-operated, and Faber-Castell Perfection erasers. I have always been wary of any version of erasing, for they seem to be mere attempts of removal at best with a high possibility of further mistakes, but considering Kutch's expertise these methods may be in my near future if necessary.
It is key to my inquiring artistic eye to seek out other professionals' finishing touches of choice. Seasoned artists know the best answers to this via experience, and Kutch gives insight into fixatives and framing preferences.
The artwork exhibited throughout this book are exquisite and will have any observer hooked from the start. Mutual Admiration and Cherry Delight (Venkatachari) are mind-blowing representations of realism. One needs to stare at the details for some time to grasp its true media. Beneath the Gates Mills Bridge (Hobbs) is a phenomenal piece of an Autumn landscape that boggles the mind knowing it is a colored pencil creation. Colman's Mushrooms displays a fantastic manifestation of texture, as does her three-dimensional drawing The Blue Dory. The fine example of layering in Bowen's Stumpy hypnotizes the reader by the adoring eyes of this beautiful dog.
This prismatic manual closes with a remarkable appendix cataloging ten manufacturers, among which are Faber-Castell and Prismacolor. Various types of colored pencils are listed within each along side of their corresponding color name. This is a magnificent inventory of color identification to assist the artist in what is available, through whom and paralleling between brands. If it were permitted, I would give The New Colored Pencil a higher rating than the maximum ranking limit. This is one of those gems an artist stumbles upon and proudly adds to their reference library in their art studio.
Kristy Ann Kutch has taught more than two hundred colored pencil and watercolor pencil workshops to artists and students nationwide. She is the author of Drawing and Painting with Colored Pencil, and is a contributor to several colored pencil publications, including The Best of Colored Pencil, Creative Colored Pencil, and Colored Pencil Explorations. Her work has appeared in International Artist Magazine and Pratique des Arts. She also authored a DVD called Colored Pencil Landscapes: Beyond the Basics, released by Artist Palette Productions. Kutch is a resident of Michigan City, Indiana.
View artwork as well as
upcoming workshops with Kristy.
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This book was provided free for review
by Crown Publishing Group
