It's back to the watery world of Jean Haines with this chunky 176-page whopper. This…
Atmospheric Flowers In Watercolour, Jean Haines – Book Review
176 pages. This book is about Jean Haines’ atmospheric style of painting as much as it’s about painting flowers. Anybody serious about painting flowers will probably be looking for books on photo-realistic paintings that belong in biological textbooks. No, although Jean obviously uses flowers as the main subject matter in this book (which includes some step by step demonstrations) this book is more about the style than the substance. All her paintings have a feeling of paint or water being spilt on them, with colours running away and doing weird things. But it takes real talent to do that sort of thing to the right degree in the right places and to still end up with an attractive painting. If you’ve looked at my previous posts, you’ll have seen that I’ve tried mimicking Jean’s style a couple of times (both times with flowers) but in both cases any runny atmospheric stuff in them looks a bit contrived. It’s all very liberating though and I really should try to extend this style to another subject matter area (i.e. landscapes).
Jean’s more passionate about her gardening than I am: I don’t see myself ever knowing the name of anything in my garden or anything that I find on the internet that’s worth painting. The only place where I refuse to go along with her suggestions is on colour selection. Jean would rather I had a huge collection of colours and pick out the one that’s the best match to a particular flower. Me though, I’m sticking to picking my three primaries and an earthy colour or two and mix up the closest thing I could to the colour of the flower. Jean should follow my lead and chill out a bit more.
Still, I do like this book. It has loads of tips, techniques and demonstrations in it. It has everything really. I’m keen to see more of this technique with other subject matter and have added another Jean Haines tome to my Amazon wishlist. And it’s not as if I have an aversion to painting flowers – there’s an Ann Blockley book on painting flowers on my wishlist. Jean Haines scores four palettes.
[Addendum. Months later, I’ve found that Jean Haines’ Atmospheric Watercolours is a better introduction to her style and technique and that this book should be seen more of an extension of that book into flowers. I’m dropping this one down to three palettes.]
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