Six-word review: Materials, techniques, and some amazing samples.

Extended review:

When my art teacher pushed me to venture into color after a year and a half of doing portraits in graphite, I decided to try colored pencils. I reasoned that a dry medium would be more manageable than paint of any variety, and I knew that I liked a far finer line and more delicate touch than I could achieve with pastels. From early childhood through college, I'd done a lot of drawing and painting for pleasure; but that was long decades in the past, and I'd never had any instruction anyway, so I felt like a novice. Kids use colored pencils. How hard can they be?

My art teacher handed me this book, saying, "You can bring it back next week."

I read the whole thing, except the part about how to lay out and build a fabulous studio in your home, and studied the illustrations. Much daunted, I nonetheless ordered a set of Prismacolors online, gave them a little tryout, and took them along to my next class.

Man, there's a lot to learn. Touch. Layering. Blending. Burnishing. Highlights--which you can't add later, or pull out with an eraser; you have to anticipate them as with watercolor and leave them showing through as white. Never mind all the usual components of line, form, value, texture, proportion, and the challenges of translating a three-dimensional subject into a two-dimensional image.

This book was my starting point, early in June. Since then, I've read two other books on the subject and skimmed a third. Predictably, individual authors have their own tips and secrets to share, and all of them recommend drawing from photographs and transferring your sketch to a clean sheet so you don't spoil the paper with erasures while you work out your form, neither of which I do. But Poulin was my foundation, and I'd call it a good one. I'm learning and making progress.

I've now completed two portraits from live models in class, concentrating mostly on technique and use of color. Here's the second one: Kate.

Colored pencils have the virtue of not splashing or spilling, but on the other hand they are slow. Serious use is not kid stuff. It took me the better part of three hours just to build the hat in this picture--the hat alone, without any of the decoration. One of the illustrations in one of the books, a composition as complex as a Persian carpet, took the artist 500 hours to accomplish.

Maybe here at last is the challenge that teaches me patience. ( )