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Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture Hardcover – January 1, 1979
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWatson-Guptill Pubns
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1979
- ISBN-10082302380X
- ISBN-13978-0823023806
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Product details
- Publisher : Watson-Guptill Pubns (January 1, 1979)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 082302380X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0823023806
- Item Weight : 3.05 pounds
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Thomas Rockwell is the author of a number of books for young readers. He was the recipient of the Mark Twain Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and the Sequoyah Award for How to Eat Fried Worms. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.
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All of these chapters are very informative: lots of writing, sketches, preliminary photos, examples, and color pictures. My only problem is with the very last chapter: how to make the actual painting. He explains everything you need to know, but all the pictures in this chapter are in black and white. He explains each step in detail: the monochrome under-painting, the color lay in, harmonizing the colors, another layer of color, and the details. But the black and white photos of this one painting that he is walking us through, they all look basically the same, because you can't see the colors. He says things like, "Look at the warmth of the Mars Violet". "Notice how the red dress does not overwhelm the face". "I changed the mans jacket from cool gray to warm gray". The photos accompanying this tell us nothing. I think the publisher must have thought that no one was actually going to bother reading that far into the book, or even actually care how Rockwell does it. But this is the whole point of the book, so I feel cheated by the publisher.
On the other hand, there is a TREMENDOUS amount of information on the preliminaries. And in the final chapter, you can tell he does the standard under-painting, first layer and second layer, so it's not a complete mystery, even if the color pictures don't show it.
He also has a summary version of his steps of procedure at the end of the book "Norman Rockwell Illustrator", by Arthur Guptill, first published in the 1940's. If you can't afford this book, Norman Rockwell Illustrator is on Amazon for a few pennies or a few dollars, and that last chapter will get you going in the right direction.
Norman Rockwell's technique was not really a secret. In fact, it was very standard. The trick is, he could just do it better than everybody else. But it does not hurt knowing what he did so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel.







