Painting the Allure of Nature

Rating:
Summary: Capture the Intricate Details of Nature... with Watercolor!
Review:
I've always been captivated by the beautiful realism of nature art, but the majority of books I read that covered detail-style nature painting focused mostly on opaque media, particularly oils and acrylics. While I do enjoy both of these media, I've longed for a good book that captured the meticulous detail and inherent beauty of nature, in watercolor. This book is exactly what I was longing for.

If you love meticulous detail and realism in nature painting, and the soft, flowing feel of watercolor, but never envisioned putting them together, hold on to your paintbrushes! Susan D. Bourdet captures the incredible details and textures of nature with watercolor, while also embracing the soft, free-flowing beauty unique to this amazing medium. Better yet, in Painting the Allure of Nature, she shares her mastery of both subject and medium, to take the reader on a step-by-step journey through various techniques and breathtaking projects, one right after another.

The chapters in this book include:
- Materials, Preparations and Choosing Pigments;
- Ideas from Nature;
- Background Techniques for Nature Painters;
- Painting Flowers and Leaves;
- Painting Birds;
- Painting Nature's Textures; and
- Putting it All Together, Step by Step.

I found the chapters on backgrounds and textures to be particularly enjoyable as they really show the uniqueness of the medium, and how it can be harnessed to create incredible, realistic nature paintings. If you're interested in capturing the realism of nature with watercolor, this is the book you've been looking for. It is definitely one of the better books on the subject. I can't recommend it enough.

Rating:
Summary: Great for any Watercolorist
Review: I love this book! Wildlife is one of my favorite painting subjects (along with florals and still life) but I've always used acrylic or scratchboard for my wildlife art. I've never been able to see how watercolor could be used to create convincing wildlife art - until now. The detail the author achieves on a bird wing or beak, for example, is amazing (the book only shows bird wildlife). The techniques she uses to create feathers, peeling paint on wood, bark, etc is so lifelike I was amazed.

I was also very pleased with her chapter on composition. Composition has always been a particularly weak subject for me so I'm always looking for insight in how to create stronger designs for my paintings. For example, I liked her suggestion of lightly penciling an "X" from two corners to their opposites. If your painting has several minor points of interest this will help you arranging them for maximum impact to help the main point of interest so all areas of the painting will have a strong design. She covers how to take reference photos and pull them together for one original painting. She also covers painting from life.

She covers everything from paper selection to stretching and masking. She covers brush selection, color theory (hue, chroma, value), color mixing strategies (occasionally she will use a tiny bit of white gouache for fine details), properties of pigments and using them to maximum effect to brushing techniques such as glazing, drybrushing, scraping, splattering, rock salt, etc for textures. There are a lot of mini-demonstrations with step-by-step close ups of popular wildlife subjects such as waterdrops on leaves, eyes, feathers, cobwebs, peeling paint, rotting wood, fog, snow, blurred hummingbird wings, out-of-focus backgrounds, etc. The later chapters of the books have full step-by-step demonstrations of complete paintings.

In short, even though the subject is about wildlife painting a large part of the book has information and techniques that could be used for other types of paintings as well. And I'm still amazed she does this all in watercolor. If I did not know better I would swear she achieved some of the details in oil or acrylic. Many of the birds in the focus area look like they were painted in oil or acrylic while the rest of the painting would have the more typical "watercolor-ish" look. I am surprised anyone can have such control over watercolor they could make it look like oil or acrylic if they choose to do so! She certainly has that control. Some of the techniques she demonstrated for detailing a bird wing almost remind me of egg tempera painting. Yet she makes sure that the paintings never lose the special charm that watercolor has. Painting the Allure of Nature is definitely one of my top 3 wildlife how-to books in my collection. If you enjoy painting birds and their environments I think you would enjoy this book's insights.