Customer Reviews

How to Paint Like the Impressionists: A Practical Guide to Re-Creating Your Own Impressionist Paintings

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3 star:		(2)
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I love impressionist paintings so I purchased this book to learn how to paint like the impressionists. The book's goal is quite ambitious. Teaching you how to paint like each of the impressionist masters in less than 150 pages just isn't possible. But the author does as good as a job as possible in this setting. The book is evenly devided amongst the artists, so you can get a feel for the differences of each artists. Instead of copying an entire painting, which would be much more challenging, she focuses on a small area of the painting. This actually makes sense to explain the techniques.

The shortcomings of this book in my opinion are that I felt the book was more about copying the impressionist paintings rather than learning their techniques. In many cases the copies were pretty good but close examination showed completely different textures and it's obvious the technique was in fact quite different. In other cases the copy wasn't very close to the original.

I've also read "Paint With the Impressionists" and the author took a different approach: He painted original scenes in the styles of the various impressionists. I think that one gives a little more insight to their technique.

I think a better title for this book would be "How to copy impressionist paintings". Overall if you want to learn about the impressionists and need some guideance in copying their paintings, this is not a bad book. However if you do some studying on your own, and have access to a museum to study some original paintings I think you can do equally well without this book.

What I liked about the book is that it takes up the subject matter of how to paint a painting an Impressionist made. If anything , reading this book, if not doing any techniques, still allowed me to understand better the impressionistic paintings I will see at art museums. Susie takes a look at about 9 impressionists as well as
Japanese art the impressionists were influenced by. Previous to this book, it was hard to find a book that showed the techiques in pastels the artists used. A must buy. Creative Painting for the Young Artist

This book is helpful to the student seeking practical assistance in the study of the different painterly techniques of 8 Impressionists.
The practical instruction section focuses on 8 different artists and introduces the student to a small selection of their works.
The author demonstrates 'how to' by studying a portion of one painting, through analysis from a first sketch to completed painting.
A helpful practical book, however I was a trifle disappointed in the colour replication of the artists works.

I bought this for my daughter who was taking her first painting class in college. Little did I know one of her assignments later in the semester would be for her to paint her interpretation of an impressionist masterpiece. This book came in very handy to bring her up to speed on the artist's style in a very short time. It proved to be a very handy guide.

Very good review of the age and artists of the impressionist..It tells how they did it, what paints they used and shows how to do it yourself. Very informative

Since I believe all art is an impression - whether it is a photo, an oil painting, or a cold sausage lying on the bottom of a bath - I should always advise someone to develop their own 'style,' but a little help can go a long way.

This is a very helpful book - the best I've found on this subject so far.