Why Do My Clouds Look Like Cotton Wool? Art Instruction Book

Click to buy kindle edition from Amazon

Inspired by this blog and my experience teaching art, this book is a compilation of difficulties artists and beginners often face when landscape painting. It has 115 photographs and illustrations, approximately 22,800 words and 190 pages. It is available on Amazon’s Kindle store, for a modest sum or $4 or £2.60, or from my Amazon estore. Click on the image link to take you to the Amazon page where the book is located.

I plan to add more to my oil painting medic series, which are: Why Can’t I Paint Ellipses? Why is My Oil Painting Cracking? Why do My Animal Portraits Look Stuffed? and How do I Paint Skin Tones? All will be out sometime in 2011 or 2012.

Art Solutions for Landscape Painting

Many suggested solutions for landscape art are suggested, including techniques for painting clouds, reflections in water and shadows. By simple strategies, the artist can avoid garish colours in flowers, washed out landscape colours and buildings that appear skewed. This book also forces the artist to look harder at the subject matter, making more sensitive observations regarding the colour of snow or skies, for example, and also the contours of shadows and trees.

Common Peeves with Landscape Art

My years of teaching have highlighted recurrent themes with creative processes, the causes of which are more often than not the dictatorial part of the brain that insists it knows better than what the eye actually sees. The secret to overcoming this dogma is to try out various painting and drawing exercises, outlined in this book. This will help avoid trees that resemble lollypops, mountains to look like cones topped with cream or of course, for clouds to look like cotton wool.

Colour of Landscapes

A section on colour theory is invaluable to the artist wishing to avoid bright green foliage, garish flowers, a washed out sky or tarnished sunsets. Dirty colour mixes can also be prevented with better understanding on how colours behave, particularly when trying to darken colours for shadows.

Art Exercises for Landscape Painting

Everything the landscape artist needs to know can be found within this book, including a section on the art materials required, descriptions of the key art techniques associated with landscape painting and art practices that will develop landscape painting technique. Special art exercises will help the artist overcome a childish rendering of a landscape painting, which could deter the artist in the future. In truth, such problems can easily be overcome with the right strategies and with a little persistence.