About
Robert A. Sloan, 53, is a disabled writer and artist who lives with his daughter's family and his faithful Siamese cat. He teaches drawing, colored pencil realism, watercolor painting, oils, acrylics and pastels, and colored Conte crayons.
Reviews (9)
Feb 05, 2008
Painting Light with Colored Pencil is great!
3 of 3 found this helpful This is one of my all-time favorite colored pencil books -- and art books in general. Cecile Baird is one of the best colored pencil realists, with a particularly strong grasp of light and color. She demonstrates how she's created her fantastic paintings -- when colored pencil is used this heavily the result is a painting, not a drawing.
A good reproduction of her painting is shown, then a step by step demonstration taking one element of her large original work to let the student get a feel for how to render difficult subjects like transparent glass with reflections on it, light streaming into the shadow through it and what's behind it, or a candle, or a rose.
Cecile Baird also goes into composition and design principles. Like most good art books, this has an overview of basic good drawing principles and hers is well written. I would recommend this book to anyone from a total beginner to an expert who's struggling with how to get blue glass in a windowsill just right. I did the candle exercise and that broke a lifetime problem I had with rendering candlelight and firelight, I'm now painting flames of all kinds with confidence and accuracy after using this book.
If Cecile Baird came out with another title I'd buy it without hesitation. This book is one of the cornerstones of my art library. The fantastic rose on the cover is actually an enlargement of one rose in a bigger painting.
Feb 28, 2008
Vintage art instruction with old time methods!
1 of 1 found this helpful I've bought many colored pencil books, and this one turned out to be a blast from the past. It covers many techniques, the amount of content is excellent -- but the samples are archaic and none of them really demonstrate the type of colored pencil realism popular today.
However, the book is a treasury of vintage techniques that will leave you impressed with what illustrators used to do back in the day. Transfer methods like pouncing are demonstrated with clear descriptions of why this might be preferred under very light colors (the lines blend in and don't show as much). Mat cutting is described -- by using a knife and a beveled ruler, rather than today's bevel-head handheld mat cutters.
The author repeatedly suggests using a small set of artist grade pencils and concentrating on blending and mixing colors rather than relying on good matching in a large set. He also emphasizes repeatedly the benefits of sharpening your colored pencils with a knife or razorblade rather than a handheld or crank sharpener. Electric sharpeners aren't even mentioned. What's good about this is that he describes why -- a hand sharpened pencil done with a blade is going to have a chisel point or a thick-thin point, resulting in a looser, less controlled line than the round point produced with a handheld sharpener.
If you prefer a lot of control, his explanation shows why you prefer not doing it his way. All of his opinions are supported by description of what happens if you do it his way and what happens if you don't.
Some techniques and materials available today simply aren't mentioned. Burnishing with white or colors is covered in depth, but there's no mention of colorless blenders. At the time of writing, a 72 color set was the largest available range.
Other tools and materials once very common are no longer available, like the textured coquille boards or the mouth-spray fixative pump. It's an interesting view of what art was like back in 1986 -- actually it's surprising to have that recent a publication date, considering the style of examples, brands of pencils mentioned and techniques mentioned.
The book presumes a grasp of basic drawing in black and white, I would not substitute this for a general drawing course. But if you're interested in colored pencil and want to try unusual techniques like frottage, sgraffito, crosshatching in multiple colors or sharpening your pencils with a razorblade and cutting your mats with a mat knife -- then this is a fun read and may give you some new ideas. If I had to get only one colored pencils book, this wouldn't be it, but it's a cool addition to my library.
Jan 02, 2008
Cartooning the Head and Figure rocks!
1 of 1 found this helpful I've finally completed my set of four Jack Hamm how to draw books. These books are all excellent. There's a tip to using them that I learned the first time I got this one in high school -- mine is a replacement copy.
Skim-read the entire book. Just skim it, without trying to remember everything. That gives a good overview of where to look things up. Then when drawing, especially at the pencil stage, go looking up the specific thing you're drawing at the time and reread that page or two, study Hamm's illustrations.
If you want to draw a baby for a greeting card, go look up babies on the Contents page. Everything is laid out handy for you for whatever you want to cartoon, and Jack Hamm goes into great practical detail on how to draw any kind of cartoon person or caricature. My only frustration with this book is its limited topic, it doesn't go into cartooning animals, birds or architecture at all. But if you study this, you can cartoon like a professional illustrator.
The examples are quaint and old fashioned, but if you change the clothing and hair styles to something contemporary they do cover all sorts of constructions that are just as valid for someone doing a webcomic and using a tablet input device! Once you get past old fashioned haircuts and styles, you can definitely begin to appreciate the work that goes into cartooning.
It will also help with serious drawing for expressions, for motion and stance, for any number of things. The line between good cartooning and good drawing is a fine one and Jack Hamm was good at both. You might consider looking for "Drawing the Head and Figure" by the same author to complement it, along with "How to Draw Animals" and "Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes." That last would help you put your cartoon characters in a good three dimensional setting.
In all of Jack Hamm's how to draw books, there are not dozens but thousands of examples of whatever you want to draw. Compare them, vary them, sketch from them and your art will come out a lot better for it!