Painting-the

For new enthusiasts, this book is a must get for painting realistic birds of many varieties. The instructions are easy to follow and the illustrations are top notch. The author even gives the exact colors that are used in each painting.

I love Sherry's book. I went from knowing nothing about oil painting to painting bird pictures I am proud of and my family is raving over. Sherry uses step by step instructions with pictures of each individual step. She gives helpful hints for making the birds and flowers look very life like. She tells you what products she uses and why. If you want to learn to paint birds, DEFINITELY GET THIS BOOK!!!!

This book is excellent for beginners. This book provides excellent step-by-step instructions on how to paint birds and is an asset to anyone in painting birds and some flowers.

I found Alex's encouragement to find you own style and a very insightful analysis of his style to be quite informative. I enjoyed his descriptions of how his pictures were designed and more importantly what worked and didn't work. The principles that he discussed on simplicity, value, color, movement, paper-doll and silhouette relatioships, design approaches, etc. were very helpful in trying to understand and improve my own crude attempts at painting. Alex must be a very fine teacher, as his narrative was concise and very on topic through out the book.

This book is one of the indispensable ones - you have got to have it! Don't let the painting on the cover put you off (I think it is one of the weakest paintings!) Between the covers, where it counts, this book is great.

Powers has the incredible ability to paint something perfectly while making it look like it took him a few minutes. His vision is unique. To some, his work may appear messy or unfinished, but for me this is a genius at work. His paintings look simple, but it's what he leaves out that often makes his work utterly remarkable.

His concise and easy-to-understand notes on facial proportions and his analysis of elements of his technique, such as composition, design, colour, line, and shape, make for fascinating reading. Seeing the mark of the artist has always been compelling for me. Here I see it in every painting. I often refer to Powers' methods to teach my art workshops for adult students.

This is my desert island book - the book with which I would choose to be marooned. If there were a six-star rating, this book would get it. Why are you still reading? BUY IT! NOW!

This is such an immensely informative book with an incredible range of effective techniques and written in such an inspirational way. The next step must be to attend an Alex Powers workshop - anybody out there that can help me?

Liz Donovin is not only a beautiful artist, she's an excellent teacher. I study watercolors exclusively, and mostly from books. Her examples and color diagrams are truly worth a thousand words each, and her text is tightly knit into lines of priceless information, insight and instruction. Liz generously shares her secrets of mastering light, texture, and color. That's just for starters. I could go on and on. My husband ordered the book as a gift for me, under the condition I take my twice borrowed, overdue copy back to the library before I put us into hock! I did return it...but it was a long farewell! Thanks Liz, and BRAVA!

Liz Donovan's understanding of color, texture, and the moods of light is remarkable. She's an excellent teacher. Her own work is beautiful and inspiring to say the least. Liz shares her tricks and secrets of detail in diagrams and pictures that truly are worth a thousand words. She's also a wizard with words, by the way, very easy to follow her. Enjoy this master artist! This book is a joy, and my husband is making it a gift..When it arrives, the library can have their (twice borrowed/overdue) copy back...but not before! It's worth every cent! Brava, Liz Donovan!

In my opinion, Liz Donovan is an outstanding watercolor artist. I love the emotion that she captures with each painting. Just looking through her book, inspires me to paint. Throughout the book she gives multiple tips on creating that perfect look. This book is a good choice for the still life artist who wants to try his/her hand at watercolor.

I like this book, it is very attentitive to small details, the resulting paintings are very naturalistic and often very dramatic as well. The artist knows about nature and it shows.
The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and you just sit there, stuck and fascinated.

The book is using acrylic paints, but the book can be absolutely and utterly recommended for oil and watercolor as well. Even if you aren't an artist it is well worth just for browsing on the coffee table... Buy it, steal it, borrow it, just Get it.

In contrast to the abundance of books on oil and watercolor painting there are few high quality books on acrylic painting. This book however helps fill that gap. The numerous photos of step-by-step techniques for painting everything from backgrounds to various types of fur (dry, wet, patterned, white) to eyes, feathers, leaves, grass, clouds, water, waterdrops, rocks, snow, special effects and a gallery of textures is a feast for the eyes. If not for the close-up photos I would think Mr. Isaac was painting in oil.

The author covers composition do's and don'ts, balance, repetition, lighting, getting a correct pose and other tips for integrating the subject into the scene. The numerous demonstrations list the supplies used for each painting followed with step-by-step details of composition and techniques. The end of the book shows a gallery of some of Isaac's paintings and an index. These techniques can be used by anyone wanting to paint wildlife scenes in an opaque manner - not only acrylics. I've sat with this book open beside my paintings and continually used these techniques for several wildlife paintings I made in casein, Chromacolour and even alkyd. This is a book to be used, not read then stored away on the bookshelf. Get it and see your wildlife paintings improve.

This book like the artist is top notch. It's hard to find a book done by a world class artist. Terry Isaac is such an artist. Any one of the concepts presented in this book it worth the books price. All aspects of his thought processes and painting technics are revealed. Terry shows step by step examples of how he created works that he exhibits, not stuff whipped out to create a book. If your looking for a book on wildlife painting or landscape painting your not going to find a better book.

This book is detailed, well illustrated, well written, and filled with clear instructions for all levels, but even a novice could paint a respectable flower picture in minutes by following the techniques in this book. Intermediate students should be able to paint one that would sell in minutes.

A very straightforward instruction book which helps one achieve a wonderful glow in florals as well as other subject matter.

This is one of those books that you read from cover to cover, cause you just can't get enough! After following Jan's instructions on the 40% rule of shadows, my florals now not only glow, but they have taken on a real three dimensional look!!

I like this book very much. Not only does it answer color questions for inside my house, but it gives me color guidance and inspiration for the outside of my house (which is in dire need of a paint job). The photography in the book is lovely . The detailed instruction for choosing colors makes it easier than I thought it would be. This beautiful book is a useful tool.

My wife and I found this book very helpful in determining colors for the outside of our house. I learned what was needed to prep and paint the house as well. My wife enjoyed the information on color for our rooms and is planning a color scheme. This book is worth the investment.

I gave this book to several friends as house warming and wedding gifts. Both friends said they loved the book, but more than that, they were able to get use out of it. One friend found a beautiful putty paint color for the outside of her house. Her house looks amazing with charcoal colored shutters. She is so happy with the result. My other friend chose a color scheme for her living room, dining room and family room. She said the book made it easy. I have since purchased a copy for myself. I'm reading it now and am getting very inspired to make changes in my own home.

I'm very happy that Amherst Media is reissuing Photographing Your Artwork. Originally published in 1987, it's still a unique resource--the only how-to book of its kind, as far as I know, that's truly aimed at artists who want to photograph their own work successfully and inexpensively, as opposed to the photographers who would otherwise do it for them. That said, I think the book's information is equally valuable for photographers who want to shoot artwork, either for artist friends or as a moneymaking business. And to apply its techniques, photographers don't have to invest in expensive strobe equipment. The techniques it describes are simple but very effective. This new edition has been revised to reflect small changes in suitable films, which have actually improved in the intervening years. When the original edition went out of print, I got lots of calls from artists trying to locate a copy. If you're out there, here it is! And thanks for your interest. --Russell Hart

Good information for those who need to take pictures of their work. This is an excellent reference. I highly recommend it if you are an artist without much photography experience and want to do it yourself.

Watch for those small books that fit comfortably in a pocket. They don't have fluff, get down to business, and are worn from significance. Photographing Your Artwork is a sort of right arm, studio mate for me, a painter-educator. I teach a Professional Issues seminar to young studio artists at an art school. At last this old friend is back-in-print. Believe me! There is no other reference in print that so clearly covers the basics. More importantly, does its job of teaching with style and clarity. Visual artists need this information and the skills it teaches.

Some said that PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER, who started as a landscape painter, swallowed and then spat the Alps onto canvases and panels calling up Italian mountainous landscape masters Giulio Campagnola and Titian. In fact, he played out about 80 real "Children's games" in the Italian city view style of Piero della Francesca and of the woodcut-illustrated works of Sebastiano Serlio. But earlier Netherlandish school influences were in Flemish landscape painter Joachim Patinir-type bird's-eye detailed never-never land mapping of "Landscape with Christ appearing to the apostles at the sea of Tiberias," "The flight into Egypt," and "The parable of the sower"; and later in Herri met de Bles-type "Procession of Calvary," as his largest picture, "Sermon of St John the Baptist," and "Suicide of Saul" in all its Albrecht Altdorfer-type impressionistic brilliance, as forerunners along with the brilliantly yellow "Harvesters" and the three "Haymaking" women to Peter Paul Rubens. "The adoration of the kings," as his first large-figure and only upright-formatted picture, was one of two Italian-influenced paintings, with altarpiece-type proportions, Masaccio-type Moor, late Quattrocento-type bending and kneeling kings, and Michelangelo-type upper body for the Christ Child against balanced interweaving of strong and subdued reds, pink, green, dun, chamois, and black. The other was the one work that he kept with him until death, his small picture of Christ with Raphael-type pivotally placed adulteress, as one of his most copied paintings along with "Winter landscape with a bird trap," in a mature, rare grisaille with brown touchings and gray shades, and with his favorite theme of humility and tolerance. His only mythological "Landscape with the fall of Icarus" had its ploughman doing business as usual, thereby acting out the German proverb of no plough stopping for the sake of a dying man. Elsewhere, subtly color-schemed figures and spaces pioneered applying Hugo van der Goes-type stupid staring to bug-eyed, senselessly frenzied human automatons in "Parable of the blind" and bringing together in one artwork about 100 "Proverbs." He foreran Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Rembrandt in daringly artificial light effects for great spiritual depth with the brightly illuminated head of St John the Evangelist asleep and the supernaturally lighted Virgin Mary dying uncustomarily surrounded by patriarchs, martyrs, holy virgins, and confessors. The later bareboned getting across attitudes and moods by key body language, as in "The big fish eating the little fish," and by untraditional symbols, as in gluttonously round bulks of bellies and trees in "The land of Cockaigne," took the place of his earliest image- and motif-crowded works, as in the Botticelli-type Calumny with the King and his advisors, Ignorance and Suspicion, for his print series on "Vices" and in the Hieronymus Bosch-type grotesque animal and human combinations of fantasies running wild, with the "Christ in limbo" and "Last judgment" drawings and with the many-hued, -shaded, -textured, and -tinted "Fall of the rebel angels," "Mad Meg," and "Triumph of death" paintings. Throughout, his art drew on a mastery of color, from the wintry crisp, subdued black, brown, gray and white "Hunters in the snow" to the delicately dun, gray, mauve and subdued green "Misanthrope" and the pointillistically fresh-leafed "Landscape with the magpie on the gallows." So author Wolfgang Stechow leaves readers on good terms with the 16th-century Flemish artist's hugely productive career and scantily documented life. His clearly written and helpfully illustrated book works well with HIERONYMUS BOSCH by Jos Koldeweij et al, SEBASTIANO SERLIO ON ARCHITECTURE, SERLIO ON DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE, and ALBRECHT ALTDORFER AND THE ORIGINS OF LANDSCAPE by Christopher S Wood.

I got this book two or three years ago in an Italian-language edition. I can't read Italian, so I can't comment on the quality of the text, but I can say that any Bruegel fan will be very happy to have this book, with or without readable words.

The trouble with most Bruegel books is that they show tiny reproductions of the paintings, necessarily much reduced in size, and, if you're lucky, show a detail or two of each picture. Yet more than any other painter I know of, the pleasure of Bruegel is in the mass of figures. There is no point at all in looking at a painting like the "Children's Games" if you can't spend a good long time looking at all the different figures, enjoying their games and funny poses, and marvelling that the artist could paint them all with such confidence, in translucent paint and with such a sure touch that it looks as if he never rubbed anything out in his whole career.

That's why this book is such a joy: there are ten full-page details of the "Children's Games", on good big pages and in very accurate color. There are ten full-page details of the "Carnival and Lent" picture, and six of the "Suicide of Saul", which is such a small picture to begin with that the details in this book are mostly larger than actual size.

The selections in this book, as the title says, are limited to the pictures in the Vienna museum. This is not as bad a limitation as it might sound, since the majority of Bruegels in the world are probably in this museum. The larger of the two Tower of Babel paintings is here (the one with Nimrod in the foreground), and so are the "Conversion of St. Paul", some of the most famous landscapes, and the splendid "Road to Calvary", with the wonderful classical Mary surrounded by horrible fairground types. All of the pictures are shown with no fewer than four detail pages.

Limiting the book to the Vienna museum does mean that some favorites are left out, though. The Fall of the Rebel Angels, The Triumph of Death, and the smaller, redder Tower of Babel are not in this book. It's still a wonderful volume.

Pieter Bruegel The Elder must have been a very interesting fellow. I would have liked to have known him. This lovely book lets you enter the strange world of Bruegel, overflowing with the reality of the 16th century Netherlands mixed (in the same painting) with biblical and classical scenes! To the modern eye and mind these are very disconcerting combinations! You have the Tower Of Babel being constructed next to a waterway which contains European sailing ships, while off in the distance you can see the houses of Antwerp. You have Icarus falling into the sea while a 16th century farmer walks by with his ox and while another man fishes nearby, both seemingly oblivious to the fate of the poor man. Bruegel's paintings, most of which were done on wood panel, are full of many different people doing many different things. You get a sense of hustle and bustle and life. Oftimes the people are odd-looking and have strange physiques. Children are indistinguishable from adults. Visual puns abound. Men at a wedding dance have outrageously bulging codpieces; bare buttocks are sometimes visible through windows. Other paintings contain moral lessons and are full of horrible demons or skeletons rampaging through the countryside like some awful supernatural army, raping and murdering. Still other paintings are of idyllic scenes, such as maidens walking through the countryside at harvest time or children playing games on the ice during winter. Bruegel was a master of color and the harvest scenes glow with golden yellow and the winter scenes chill you with whites and subtle greys and leaden skies. Taschen has done it again with another fine book with excellent commentary and high quality reproductions. The paintings of Bruegel are full of humor and horror and beauty and ugliness and sometimes so much is going on you can't digest it all at one time. The paintings of Bruegel are full of life.

Gorgeous nature artwork. The frog is exceptional. Agnew's rendering of translucent animal skin, dewdrops and leaves is miraculous, but you won't learn how exactly to airbrush those types of things. How the works get from roughed-in ideas to detailed airbrushed plant foliage is NOT well-documented here. If you want to learn how to do detailed airbrushing, this is not the book for you. But if you want to be inspired by some great technique and learn some of it (for example, how to do translucent effects) this book is excellent.

There are many good books on nature; there are many good books on art; there are many good instruction manuals. John Agnew's "Painting the secret world of nature" is a rare book that excels in all three of these.

Beginners as well as experienced artists will find this book both technically helpful and aesthetically pleasing. Its clear-cut instructions and step-by-step illustrations, showing the process of creating and elaborating a visually striking image, will help a practicing artist to improve the technique of realistic painting.

All professional artists have their own trade secrets; few are willing to share them; even fewer are able to do it in a way that makes sense to others. John Agnew's book is the one that does it superbly.

For the realist artist this book is great! Altho' Mr. Agnew's main interest is in painting exotic animals and places, many of his technics can be used for other realistic painting. I highly recommend this book.

This is an absolutely exquisite book, with highgloss paper and wonderful color reproductions of marvelous paintings.

To this, Drury offers his expert commentary on how one might look at these paintings to see the painter's perspective on the Christian faith.

One will learn much about looking at paintings, and will never casually observe a painting again. I especially have grown fond of two paintings that this marvelous book acquainted me with, Titian's "Vendramin Family" and Lippi's "The Annunciation." Drury's comments here are very useful.

I would like to give this five stars, but withheld this because of my disagreement theologically with Drury. His theology is far too liberal for me, and I'm afraid that he will sway many who will trust his opinion of Divine Scripture as "the gospel truth, or historical critical truth."

A book to consider to turn to to aid one in viewing Christian painting.

John Drury is an art historian who uses his vocation as a priest to explain the subtlety of meaning that lies hidden in the symbolism of religious paintings in London's National Gallery.

Anyone how has looked at such a painting but not "seen" it, would do well to read this wonderful book and share the insights that the author offers. Paintings that I would have passed by with scarcely a second glance, are revealed within a context of their time, with reference to their history, the world view of the artist, the common and uncommon symbolism employed and much else besides.

It gives the possibility of sharing a visual language that we have lost and enables us to understand what it is about a picture that we sense is great, without comprehending why that might be.

It is hard to think that anyone who has ever visited an art gallery could not profit from reading this book and has certainly given me the enthusiasm to go and look at the pictures for myself.

Painting The Word is a truly outstanding guide to Christian paintings and their meanings brings art and spirituality together in an inspiring coverage. More than a history of painting, this discusses how Christian images reflected and influenced Christian civilization as a whole, with a universal quality delivering balanced messages. Color reproductions of significant Christian works appear throughout.