Creating Textured Landscapes With Pen, Ink And Watercolor, Claudia Nice – Book Review

This is the last of the stash of art books that I got for my birthday. It’s a 144 page paperback and is in landscape format. It’s still roughly A4 size, though, so just as big as any 144 page portrait format book.

It’s divided into eight roughly equally sized chapters. The first is an introduction to lots of different tools and techniques and then there are seven chapters talking about and demonstrating how these can be applied to painting:

• clouds and skies
• mountains and hills
• trees and foliage
• rocks and gravel
• water
• grass and flowers
• buildings, bridges and fences

It’s comprehensive and well structured list which means that this book will work well as a reference book going forward. It was refreshing for there to not be a big long introductory chapter on what paints, brushes and paper to buy and how to use a brush. Or, worse still, several pages devoted to why we should all be painting in sketchbooks rather than doing proper paintings. No, none of that in here. Although you do need some curry sauce around the meat and I did particularly like how, near the beginning, Claudia told us that paintings were all about shapes, value, colour and texture. It just reminded me how important texture is, and how it doesn’t get as much attention in books as all those other areas.

The book is well packed with ideas. I expected these to me mainly around the use of pen and ink but there’s a lot more in there. This is about creating textures and everything you can imagine is included. A lot of these techniques are similar to those described in books by Ann Blockley and Jane Betteridge but this book includes enough extra information on those techniques for it to represent progress. There are some demonstrations in there but they didn’t feel like demonstrations. I didn’t get that feeling that I used to get when the Two Ronnies introduced special guest Barbara Dixon and you could feel the pace change. Any demos just fell like part of the ongoing narrative. Maybe because they were more like mini demos.

One unusual thing about the book that’s worth commenting on is that almost all of the text within it is handwritten. Or is it written in a font that’s supposed to look like handwriting? Either way, it was perfectly easy to read and added to the rustic charm of the book.

This is quite a short review as there’s not much to say. There was no real “journey” through the book with techniques getting harder and harder or anything like that. It was more like a huge brain dump by Claudia of everything she could think of about how to create textures in watercolour paintings. And it was a well organised brain dump, resulting in a book that will be used as a reference for years. If I were to compare it to Ann’s and Jane’s books, I’d say that Jane with her series of demos takes us on a journey and Ann inspires us with her paintings but that Claudia is the one who I’ll be going to if I need help adding texture to a particular landscape feature. Three very different authors bringing different things to the table. Anyway, this is a very good book but not up to galactico status as it won’t make big changes to my painting. It gets four palettes (so five stars on Amazon).

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