Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Painting Nature in Oil

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book shows how a painting can capture the essence of a landscape photo without the complexity of every bush tree and rock contained in a photoghaph. There are sections on changing the natural focal point away from animals to a prominent landscape. The sequencing of the development of the painting is easy to follow and little interpretation is required. It's very well presented with a great amount of detail which covers a vast number of settings. Seashore to mountains to forests, plains, and eastern lakes and streams are shown. A great addition to your how to and how to solve library.

I own many art books, but this one is impressive. The author shows photographs and resulting paintings for 135 different landscape painting situations. I find it extremely helpful to see not only the final painting, but also the original photographed scene on which it was based. To me this book is invaluable. I also love the artist's personal style, which is expressive yet realistic. In fact, I love the whole book and return to it again and again for help and inspiration and sometimes just to admire the wonderful paintings! This is a must-have for landscape artists.

I didn't know what to expect when I purchased "The Big Book of Painting Nature in Oil". But, after my initial misgivings, I have found it enormously useful as a reference for composition, color selection and methods to paint difficult subject matter (for a beginning artist with no formal art education) such as forests, fog, grass. When I paint outside, I take it with me. It has helped me be more selective in setting up my painting and helped me to simplify. Wonderful book! I'm glad I bought it.

I returned this book after flipping through the pages in less than a half-hour. The paintings are more expressive and impressionist than realistic--which is great if that's what your goal is to paint. For me, I want realistic paintings down to the smallest detail. The book has demos for painting specific details like fog, snow covered rocks, reflections in rivers and streams and so on, but they aren't realistic. Like I said earlier, they're more expressive. Not my style.

I love the idea of dividing difficult subjects into different sections with advice and examples of how to tackle each. This book is divided into tree, sky and water sections, with subsections for each. Under the sky section, for example, are lessons on painting cloud-streaked skies, moody skies, skies after a storm, night skies and about forty more varieties of skies, with some work in progress pictures in many of the sections and side-by-side comparisons of the reference photo versus the actual painting.

Unfortunately, I think the paintings themselves fall short in this book. Some of the paintings are beautiful but most look like the efforts of a beginner artist to me. I understand that tastes vary so please flip through the book before you make the decision to purchase it. The paintings are impressionistic so if you're looking for realistic, every-detail-captured paintings, this book isn't going to cut it for you. It's not the fact that the paintings are impressionistic that bother me, but that they often come across as being very flat. As I flipped through this book last night, I realized that the artist leans a little too much on the photos he is referencing, which is why those darker areas where so much vitality could lie look almost dead in his renditions. It also seems that sometimes even the artist falls into the common trap of not looking past preconceived notions of color by almost always painting a tree or rock brown, despite whether it actually is or not.

I'm personally not a plein air artist (painting from life rather than photos) and I rely quite heavily on photos in my artwork, but I do believe that to be a successful artist you must know how to fill in the weak spots presented by photos, otherwise your growth as an artist will be limited. For the beginning artist this book will certainly be a helpful foundation, but if you're looking for a little more information I recommend books by Kevin Macpherson, especially "Fill Your Oil Paintings With Light & Color." When I was just beginning to paint and had hit a rut in my artistic growth, the suggestions and examples from that book gave me a whole new understanding of where to go and how to achieve it.

"The Big Book Of Painting Nature In Oil" was created to bring everything one needs to paint nature in oil in one BIG book - 400 pages filled with 135 lessons in oil techniques for painting trees, skies, and water; 135 reference photographs; and 600 illustrations in full color, including 60 step-by-step demonstrations.

The book brings everything one needs to paint nature in oil, beginning with the basics, the essential materials and techniques and an exploration of color and special effects that add excitement. 135 lessons follow with tips on painting trees, flowers, leaves, bark, and fruit, in all seasons of the year. Next, you will learn to paint all types of skies - quiet, dramatic, sun-filled, or stormy. And finally, you will explore painting water, everything from rivers, lakes, and the ocean to fog, mist, ice, and snow. Each lesson focuses on a specific problem.

Since oil is an "incredibly" flexible medium, the authors' focus is on increasing the excitement and pleasure of painting nature in oil with many varied subjects for all types of painters.

The photographs that are included are to assist in understanding how an artist translates what he/she sees into a painting. It is hoped that the artist will grasp how a scene was interpreted and discover new ways of composing paintings.

I have the distinct pleasure of studying oil painting under renowned landscape artist Charles White. I have found "The Big Book Of Painting Nature In Oil" is an excellent alternative to solving specific problems when Charles is not around.

The Big Book of Painting Nature in Oil should be a standard reference in every oil painting library. From the most basic landscape of a lone tree to the intricate details of autumn color, the reader-painter is taken on a journey of discovery.
Beginners to seasoned landscape artists will appreciate the attention given to the palette, color mixing, supports, materials, and techniques. Each painting lesson features a reference photograph and step-by-step instructions that, with time and practice, help the reader become a better artist.

I am relatively new to oils. I found this book amazingly helpful when working on a painting. I could flip through the book to find a specific techniques I was working on, and got a lot of good ideas as to how to proceed. Almost everything you could encounter in landscape painting is covered.

This book is not a "beautiful painting book". It is a nuts and bolts guide to dealing with painting various aspects of nature. The paintings in the book are essentially sketches, showing you how to start, and techniques you can use, to create your own interpretations. In many cases, step-by-step insturctions are included. I have used this book over and over, and it is full of my page markers and notes. It is filled with lots of techniques, some of which really helped me to move on when I was stuck.

I liked this book so much that I ordered the companion book in pastels. I am pleased with that book as well, and can't wait to try out some of the ideas the author has for handling almost everything you can run into when painting nature.

I have sold many of my art books, because they just were no longer useful to me. But I am holding on to this one for good!

Perhaps the strongest point in this book is repetition of the artist's sequence of steps for each painting. For a novice painter, getting the sequence right saves a lot of frustration later. There are close to 400 pages of color demonstrations, most demos spanning 2-4 pages, organized by trees, skies, and water - along with a bit of everything else that makes up a landscape (hills, cabins, animals, etc.). The many landscape reference photos are well chosen and rather striking, and the demo paintings are pretty accurate representations of the photos, although not detailed enough for realism. Many scenes appear to be taken along the length of the American Rocky Mountains, but also with a fair number from both coasts, southwest, and midwest. Very little of this book is devoted to tools and materials (7 pages), color mixing (5 pages), and brushwork (7 pages), but that's enough for the techniques demonstrated here. For a more comprehensive book on painting techniques, one of my favorites remains The Complete Painting Course: A Guide to Techniques in Oils, Watercolors and Acrylics. See my other reviews for other suggestions.

I am really happy with this book. I am enjoying the step by step demos and following them
I highly recommend this book