Dec 09
This beautifully illustrated book is a compilation of four of the earlier successful watercolour tips and techniques books from Searchpress. It contains over 20 step by step demonstrations showing how everyone can achieve beautiful and successful landscape paintings. Its an inspirational book for anyone wishing to explore the beauty of watercolour painting and use it to its fullest extent to create wonderful fresh landscapes. Each artist covers various different techniques within their own specialty followed by beautiful illustrations of some of their works showing the methods they used within each. They show us their most used colours from their palette for their specialist subjects, and its interesting to note how these vary from artist to artist according to the genre they paint. There are some tips on other useful items for using with watercolours, that one may not have thought of using but will bring textural variety to one's work. Particularly useful is the help given on how to retrieve paintings that have gone awry. Its often believed that watercolour is a One Chance medium but these artists show us some favourite ways of rescuing artworks, very useful to both the beginner and more experience artists. This book gives us very detailed step by step instructions covering initial washes and how to lay them, what brushes to use and when down to the very essential final details that lead to the creation of beautiful and realistic landscapes the artist will be proud to own. An essential book for anyone wishing to create convincing watercolour landscapes.
* JeannieZelos.com *
Nov 09
This is another of Search Press's bind-ups of several titles from the same series. Once again, if you haven't already got most of the titles included, it's very good value.
For the record, what you get is:
Painting Landscapes & Nature by Richard Bolton
Painting Skies by Geoff Kersey
Painting Water by Joe Francis Dowden
Painting Flowers & Plants by Janet Whittle
The Tips and Techniques series is aimed at artists who already have a little experience and features specific topics and subjects for them to develop their style and technique. There are step-by-step demonstrations as well as analyses of completed paintings and the whole is nicely balanced.
* Artbookreview.net *
Jan 2010
Watercolour Landscapes Tips and Techniques is a great resource for beginner artists. It the combination of writing and demonstration from the four artists gives a beginner a useful insight into not only the work of different artists, but also a look at how they have adapted techniques to create their own style. More experienced watercolour artists will also find areas of interest as some techniques, for instance negative painting, require a little prior experience.
* Suite101.com *