Artbookreview.net

The subtitle to this is important because it’s the only clue on the cover to what the book is really about and that’s just about the most thorough and comprehensive look at coloured pencil drawing I’ve ever seen.

For a long time, coloured pencils languished at the back of the art cupboard, overshadowed by their more famous cousins, the oils, the watercolours and perhaps the pastels too. Shyly, they bided their time, but knew that they’d always be seen as the tools of the child and the schoolroom, never able to compete in the brash world of Real Art. But the people who make pencils had other ideas and other marketing teams and they started to produce artists’ quality ranges: blending and watercolour pencils and they positively demanded that these be taken seriously. Well, you know how persuasive a marketing person can be when they’ve got a sales director breathing down their neck.

This book is a positive masterclass and a real revelation of what you can achieve with anything so humble as a pencil, something that doesn’t need expensive brushes or paper or special mediums, something you can just take out of the box and use, right there and then; say kids, why don’t we do the show . . . Right Here?

Arlene Steinberg’s technique is to build colours up in layers so that, for example, to finish with a green tomato, you start with a red one (I won’t spoil it for you here). It says in the blurb that this is based on the techniques of the Old Masters and I’m not going to argue with that, though I suspect telling you that might be a way of validating the medium and getting you to take it seriously. And Arlene certainly does take it seriously. There’s a very vague whiff of the obsessive here because she has a bit of a mountain to climb. You are, after all, being asked to create serious artworks with, oh my gosh, pencils. And you will.

This is good stuff. Some of the results are better than others, but that’s no bad thing because you can see what works best and what just works. Tell you what: there’s not going to be anything like this for a long time, so buy it now before they sell out!

North Light 2008
£18.99

Author: Arlene Steinberg, Medium: Pencil, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Techniques