Painting Landscapes
Painting Landscapes - A creative approach in watercolour and mixed media
Alison C. Board
Search Press
Who is the author?
Reading about her online, she seems to me the approachable artist. Someone who understands the usual life; not the quick made it successfully and cannot remember the life of the aspiring artist. She specialises in watercolour and sketching work. Teaching and having been party to running a gallery. She has over 30 years experience within the arts and her website showcases her teaching skills very well (visit here)
My impression is of a woman who fully engages with her life as an artist, she lives the life, thrives on the environment and she uses her skills to capture nature and landscape is a may many will only wish for.
What is the book about?
I see this book as a letting go, of maybe the noise of the outer world, in order to give in to the deep creative soul we can each have within us.
This is very much a tool to teach painting skills within the landscape context. Yet it drives creativity no not only what we see and can observe, but what we can bring in ourselves from our imagination and memory.
This is a book on mixed media work.
Highlights
If we are working on our own, we only have ourselves or maybe a beach engine to ask when we come to dead ends. The artist here tries to use her learned experience to approach the challenges, knowing what they may be. So throughout you will come across “problems”, for example on page 181, a lack of storytelling value coming through from our painting. This may seem like a lesser worry on paper, but in practice, if our parting does not feel alive, it lacks the magic. Only a painter who has lived a little, can provide this sort of guidance.
The active advice to ‘connect’ is so valid for our lives. We need that time to shut away the ‘have-to’ demands and just be in our natural world.
The book is very adaptable. Obviously we would all like to be able to go see lovely things and paint them in real time. However what about those of us, who can only see the world from the interior out? There is a method and way for each one of us.
Personally, I like the way the artist prompts us to build our own conclusions. So the results are personal, ones we can feel are authentic to us.
I have never read a book like this where the author gives us two ‘outcomes’ - for example, there are five projects and each one has two ways of working it out. That allows us even more self discretion, which means the results are even more “us” and not book led.
Where to buy
