Colored Pencil Painting Portraits

From the Introduction:

The colored pencils in my studio are amazingly resilient. They have successfully outlasted the many temptations presented by paints, pastels, inks, etc., and, umpteen years later, still hold the preferred position on my work table. I have used the vast quantity of accumulated knowledge about the properties of other mediums and incorporated the more useful ones to further advance and extend the benefits of the colored pencil painting process.

Through continuous research, experiments, and testing, the exceptionality of the colored pencil medium has become clear to me. Their precision and flexibility allows artists to achieve practically any desired effect. We simply need to understand their much overlooked properties and use them to our own advantage. As a result, even the sometimes cumbersome task of covering a large background is no longer a chore. If you know how, you can overcome such challenges in just a fraction of the time you may have come to expect.

In this book we continue the discussion started in Colored Pencil Painting Bible about the colored pencil painting process. However, this time it will be based on the example of the portrait genre. Since the publication of my first book some of the techniques I use today have been updated or modified, some tools were added and others abandoned, and some ideas have been adopted or rejected. But the fundamentals of my approach remain the same. I continue layering colored pencils onto a white surface producing finished artwork that resembles a painting rather than a drawing. We will be discussing all aspects of these practices in detail throughout the pages of this work.