Customer Reviews

Seasonal Landscapes: Painting Watercolours With Acrylics

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This is a very good book for basic to advanced painters. The beginner will find easy step-by-step lessons as well as excellent chapters on color mixing and composition. The book begins with basic paintings that can all be completed in 45 minutes or less with the second half of the book getting into more detailed techniques. Maybe the colors could be a little brighter but the printed pictures show good detail for brush strokes and the "how-to" steps to get started painting a niece landscape painting.

It may be interesting to note that Keith currently has an excellent show on Sound TV called 'The Art Doctor'(via Sky in the UK). One of the notions he promotes is that, to get started, we can forget most of what is normally taught about watercolor painting - including what type of paint to use!!! There's an uncanny similarity between Keith's technique with watered down acrylics and the Bob Ross technique in oils - even Keith's easel and painting knife look very similar to Bob's! Certainly, Keith's sense of color is different to mine (as was Bob's), but his application techniques are easy to master and produce great results. That's qualification enough for me!

If I can prevent even one person from buying this book, then writing this review will have been worth it. Mr. Fenwick is absolutely, totally unqualified to teach anyone about watercolor painting. All of his paintings look like the first feeble attempts of a fourteen-year old. The colors are insipid and uncoordinated. The drawing is inept. The instructions are simplistic formulas such as "the mountains are a series of letter M's", "the beach is the letter C", and so on. Almost any other book on the subject would be infinitely superior to this one.

"Anyone can paint" writes Mr Fenwick, instantly and enthusiastically disproving this statement with his own lacklustre compositions. Those among you familiar with Mr Fenwick's tv show "The Art Doctor" will find the quotation: "Physician, heal thyself." all too fitting. Yet another book of formulaic nonsense aimed at those individuals believing they have some latent artistic ability ready to be unleashed upon the world. Sadly, most don't. This book will do nothing to change that.