Customer Reviews

Painting from Life: Explorations in Watercolor

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For students or admirers of life drawing, this book is an inspiration! The style is loose, fresh and spontaneous. The beautiful art works on each page take us from drawings to watercolors, from portraits to abstraction. Lew explores a wide variety of approaches to color, light and shape.

The book is pure pleasure to look at, and offers advice and inspiration for those trying to capture on paper or canvass the challenging, exhilarating subject of the human form.

Like Charles Reid's figure paintings and Mel Stabin's The Figure in Watercolor, this book belongs on the bookshelf of artists who eschew photorealism and prefer the fast, fresh approach.

This watercolor book is tightly focused on one aspect of art technique. The author presents his experiences over several years in an art consortium, which specializes in providing artists short poses of live models. The poses ranged from 1 minute to 45 minutes, with many around 20 minutes. This book presents the history of sketches Mr. Lew made at such sessions. Each sketch is accompanied by commentary on what the artist was trying to achieve. There are a few longer discussions on topics throughout, at the start of each chapter. The book progresses from use of dry medium (e.g., pencil) for sketching, into greyscale watercolor, to watercolor using all colors, into semi-abstractionism.

The comments and pictures have useful information, and show quite clearly the value of practicing from live models in short poses. Also, this book has a few valuable lessons; like, if you are getting borred, try something new, and the importance of backgrounds. After reading this book, I found myself trying some of these ideas on 15 to 60 minute poses with a live model. So, while my first impression was 3 stars, this earned "Painting from Life" a forth star. Advice on paiting that I can actually use is quite worthwhile!

It seems to me that the technique and approach displayed is entirely dissimilar from that of Charles Reid, though his books as well use sketches rather than finnished drawings for most illuminations.

For the artist who loves painting the figure in a loose style, this book is tops. You can almost imagine the loose watercolors running off the page. The colors are lush. Nothing "tight" about this artist. This is a good contrast to the usually detailed painting style of many artists.