Review: Luminous Landscapes in Graphite & Colored Pencil with Amy Lindenberger (Craftsy)

Luminous Landscapes in Graphite & Colored Pencil is a video tutorial course from Amy Lindenberger, an artist with more than 35 years of experience.

This course is quite interesting because it uses a graphite underpainting before coloured pencils are applied. This sounds like those grisaille underpainting used in oil paintings. I didn't know that it was even possible with coloured pencils.

This class is for those have some experience with coloured pencils and those who understand form and value but want to learn a new technique.

You'll need clayboard for this course because that's what Amy uses in this course and she prefers smooth surfaces. This is the achieve the soft-focus landscape drawing.

The total course runs for 146 minutes and is split into six lessions:

1. Setting Up Your Claybord - 25 min
2. Kneaded Eraser - 22 min
3. Rigid Erasers - 19 min
4. Adding Detail & Texture - 24 min
5. Color Washes - 33 min
6. Color Enhancements - 23 min

By the end of the course, you'll should have a good understanding on how to use different tools such as graphite, coloured pencils, fixative, erasers and preparing the working surface. The techniques are discussed in depth and Amy is very knowledgeable.

There are two lessons on using erasers!

You'll also learn blending techniques and how to analyze colour changes in landscapes and replicate them.

The technique itself is interesting. Initially, I thought that using a graphite layer underneath would dull down the coloured pencils and indeed it does. The end result looks a bit subdued but that could be because of the camera lighting or maybe the scan was enhanced. Either way, the artwork still looks good.

It's a very hands-on and insightful guided tutorial.

Enroll in the course or check out more reviews on Craftsy. Parkablogs readers get a 50% discount until 24 June 2016, Friday.

Disclosure: This course was provided to me by Craftsy for review purposes. You can support Parka Blogs by using the affiliate links as I get a little commission from each sale. :-)