Realistic Portraits In Colored Pencil, Karen Hull – Book Review

The book can be divided into three pieces: about 15 pages of introduction (materials, mark making), 15 pages of tips and 115 pages of demonstrations.  I think you can tell already that this won’t be scoring five palettes.

The 15 pages of introduction are pretty self explanatory.  I didn’t learn anything from them.  But then we get to the most interesting 15 pages of the book: the tips.  There was actually a fair amount of useful stuff in there on textures and facial features but this was only a small part of the book.

And then we get the demos, making up a whopping 73% of the book.  There are five of them, so they take up an average of 23 pages each.  You’d think that this would mean Karen went into a lot of detail.  And she kind of did but she didn’t.  Because rather than talking us through all her decisions she just gives us a knitting pattern.  Every step in every example is not much more than a list of colours she used.  There’s not much explanation and, when there is, it’s added at the end.  Too much “Put on these colours…..because…..” when a better author would have said “Take a look at the right of the forehead in the photo.  Can you see the pinks and blues?  I wanted to reproduce these.  I had a choice of these colours <picture>.  I went for colours X and Y because I wanted warm blue and dusky pink.”  Or whatever.  You get the picture.  Tell us a story about how you made all these decisions.  It’s the story that needs to be front and foremost, not the decisions.  I ended up looking at the photos of the work in progress and skimming over the data – I won’t even call them words.

So, yeah, not great.  I’m starting to wonder whether coloured pencil writers are just lazy and settling down into a nice easy way to write books.  At some point, someone needs to come in and do to coloured pencil books what people like Charles Reid, Hazel Soan, Jeanne Dobie and Frank Webb have done for watercolour.  Give us books of tips and examples from paintings.  No artist with any individual creativity within them is going to enjoy a book like this.  Anyway, while this one was never going to get close to three palettes, I did learn something from the 15 pages of tips, so that rules out the single palette.  Two it is then.

🎨🎨

It’s maybe worth me pointing out what it was about the similarly structured Lisa Ann Watkins book that got it a higher score than this one.  There were two things:

– more useful information on mark making in the introduction

– how, before we got to the full demos, there were individual demos on eyes, noses and fur.  A better attempt at taking us on a learning journey that going straight to the full demos.

– and how Lisa stressed that demos are just demos and not a set of instructions to be followed