The Friday 56 (108) & Book Beginnings: Colored Pencil Painting Portraits: Master a Revolutionary Method for Rendering Depth and Imitating Life by Alyona Nickelsen

The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice where every Friday you pick a book and turn to page 56 or 56%, and select a sentence or a few, as long as it's not a spoiler. For the full rules, visit the the page HERE

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader that asks you to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you're reading.

Synopsis from Goodreads...

Colored pencil painter Alyona Nickelsen reveals how to use the medium to push the limits of realistic portraiture...

Colored Pencil Painting Portraits provides straightforward solutions to the problems that artists face in creating lifelike images, and will prime readers on the intricacies of color, texture, shadow, and light as they interplay with the human form. In this truly comprehensive guide packed with step-by-step demonstrations, Nickelsen considers working from photo references versus live models; provides guidance on posing and lighting, as well as planning and composing a work; discusses tools, materials, and revolutionary layering techniques; and offers lessons on capturing gesture and expression and on rendering facial and body features of people of all age groups and skin tones...

Beginnings: "The colored pencils in my studio are amazingly resilient. They have successfully outlasted the many temptations presented by paints, pastels, inks, and other mediums and, umpteen years later, still hold the preferred position on my work table."

56: "In our attempt to match colors in life with colors in art mediums, we are actually searching for pigments with similar properties of light absorption and reflection in a never-ending attempt to create identical color sensations; however, even if we found the perfect color match, that factor is not enough to make a painted apple look like a real one."

Comments: This is one of the books I have for review. It's all about the art of creating portraits with colored pencils, which is a medium I rarely use. The beginning is taken from the introduction instead of the foreword, because honestly I liked what Nickelsen had to say about her preferred medium.

What are you reading this week?