Painting The Allure Of Nature

A guide to painting birds and flowers in watercolor, discussing tools, prepration, color, and application skills; explaining how to find and use ideas from nature; examining basic and specific watercolor techniques; and including four detailed step-by-step demonstrations.

Transform your paintings from ordinary to extraordinary - with light! Want to paint light-filled watercolors that reach out and draw viewers in? In this book, award-winning watercolorist and teacher Susan Bourdet shows you how. Through simple concepts and detailed step-by-step demonstrations, Susan demystifies the process of successfully depicting light in watercolor. You'll learn how to: • Create convincing light effects and rich shadows • Depict different light angles and times of day • Render light on a variety of subjects, from feathers and fur to flowers, water and textures • Take reference photos with exciting light and combine them into a believable composition that speaks to your viewers It's all the information you'll need to capture the magic of light in your watercolors! Includes 23 step-by-step demonstrations!

This best-seller reveals the secrets of capturing the essence of a scene using abstract techniques, from pouring inks and adding opaque lines to using crinkled wax paper as resists and collaging paintings together.

This volume explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in French artist Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) work -- and in Dada and Surrealism in general -- to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fueland springboard for questioning art's fundamental premises. Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. The author maintains that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp's readymades (Duchamp's "readymades" are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art") and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrating the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation.

Concentrating on the shifting boundaries and definition of art, Richard Kalina offers a panoramic view of the contemporary art scene over the last 30 years. His focus is on the ongoing development of concepts, the transformation of art worlds and the social matrices in which they are created. Discussing painting in general and abstract painting in particular, his survey takes in photorealism, sculpture and art forms found outside of the modernist tradition. Kalina's group of artists includes Mel Bochner, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Franz West, and Alma Thomas who, in their ongoing projects, explicitly or implicitly questioned the aesthetic assumptions of their times. Merging an examination of animating philosophies and context - political, social, and personal - with a sharply focused look at the works of art themselves, Kalina brings us closer to understanding the social matrices in which art is embedded and responds to bigger questions about the object nature of the work of art in today's world.

Shares insights, tips, tricks, and techniques, furnishing a series of illustrated lessons, complete with examples, exercises, visual comparisons, and diagrams, that teach the basics of color, texture, value, composition, and technique.