Painting the Spirit of Nature

Whether you are painting the spirit of nature--or painting nature with a free spirit--the keynote of this book is experimentation and keeping an open mind. There are many ways to capture nature, and painting a scene exactly as it appears to the eye, as a realist landscape artist does, is only one of them. Maxine Masterfield, a noted watercolorist, demonstrates basic techniques for achieving texture, color mixtures, and shapes. She also shows you new ways to work in watercolor--by pouring inks, adding opaque lines to textured passages, using crinkled wax paper as resists--and describes ways to collage several paintings together into an exciting work of art. There are not rules--but there is a general direction.