Country Flowers in Watercolour (Collins Learn to Paint)

This is indeed a very comprehensive and lucid painting book to follow and has something for every level, from beginners to advance level. Easy to follow step by step guide and can lead to some brilliant abstract floral artwork, though I have thought of creating a large loose floral abstract art taking inspiration from this book, it will take some time to materialize. Highly recommend it, especially if watercolor medium is new to you.

Ann is a fantastic painter and love her books and videos. This is an earlier book and probably more useful to the less experienced watercolourist. Still glad to have added to my collection.

The author missed an opportunity here. She creates beautiful watercolor flowers, but completely fails to provide sufficient detail on instruction. I was expecting a step-by-step guide with visual instructions for a variety of country flowers. Instead, the book blandly offers basic principles for washes, colors, marking, masking, forms, etc relying on generic descriptions that fail to fully illustrate the techniques. Most examples merely include a final picture with a short and often useless blurb on how to achieve the looks. The only description for painting a Bluebell was offered under the topic of “Looking at Flowers – choosing a viewpoint” that shows a final picture with the description “The blue of the flower runs into the stalk. This is not true to life in a botanical sense but helps to create unity and an extra sense of “blueness.” Seriously?

On the topic of painting petals, the author notes that “textures can be waxy, velvety, translucent, siliy, or crumpled,” but advises “form and shape should take precedence over pattern and details.” Then she follows with a sequence of completed flowers with brief descriptions. No steps showing the beginning forms and shapes or how the texture and details are achieved. For example, a completed water lily is depicted with the mere description “I brushed a yellow wet-into-wet wash over the water lily centre while painting the pink petals, then followed this by adding harder-edged marks on top when it dries.” There are scant offerings wirh more detail.
Finally, the last chapter offers a paltry 4 demonstrations, but even these are woefully inadequate. She describes 2-3 stages and the finished work. The first stages are helpful when they show the outline and colors used. However, she neglects to include intermediate drawings that depict the addition of different features to illustrate how they were achieved.

The bottom line is this book was supposed to be an art tutorial. You can’t expect to teach a visual medium if you fail to SHOW each step! I would not buy another book by this author.

I was pleasantly surprised at how useful this book is for developing awareness of floral shapes and the clear demos, especially the power of negative space and soft and hard edges.

Really helpful book, I’m learning a great deal about the technique of painting flowers.

This book is very cheap now. But it is essential to understand other Ann Blockley’s books. I’m glad to have it.

tout est prévu pour encourager à la recherche et à la peinture .c’est un bon début.ne pas hésiter à l’utiliser