People & Portraits (Drawing in Color)

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: i think that is a great book. it explains all the techniqes in detail. and shows you step byt step how to the drawing and coloring. Lee Hammond does great work and i love her books.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty medicore, sometimes awful
Review: Ms. Hammond's pencil portrait book is not remarkable, but at least in that book she stuck to graphite -- not color.

This book shows a decided lack of colored pencil rendering technique. There are examples of awkward and somewhat untidy rendering coupled with mediocre drawing skills. This combination does not make for a good art instruction book.

Colored pencil can easily look messy and blotchy (or uneven) if rendered improperly. There were definitely some examples of that here. Also, one would assume that a portrait book would show, well, portraits that were well-drawn. Nope, not here. Some have misaligned features which are rendered with little sensitivity.

There also seems to be a lack of understanding about how to use color as well. Some of the shadows and dark colors are "overkill" and too harsh for the face.

However, to be fair, a few of the portraits were not bad. Some portraits used a deliberate "light touch" with a more limited color scheme (one portrait in particular springs to mind) and these looked better.

There was also little actual *drawing* instruction. Sorry, but just teaching the graph or grid method isn't going to hack it. That's just one tool used for drawing, and it very easily can become a crutch of that's all an artist knows how to do. What about drawing from life? How can someone use a graph or grid to draw from life?

I understand that the author is a very encouraging teacher and that's great. But my goodness! This certainly is not the best colored pencil book out there. A *much* better choice would by any colored pencil book by the fabulous Bet Borgeson. Now *that's* colored pencil done right.