Landscape Painting Essentials with Johannes Vloothuis: Lessons in Acrylic, Oil, Pastel and Watercolor

by Johannes Vloothuis

Secrets to Painting Beautiful LandscapesPainting the landscape can be fun and rewarding--if you make the right decisions as you paint. After all, it is the artist's greatest challenge to somehow capture a sense of it all--the grandness, the majesty, the splendor of nature--with just a few strokes of paint on a canvas. Popular art instructor Johannes Vloothuis makes the process a whole lot easier with the essential techniques, key concepts and expert advice he shares in this book.   • Learn straightforward strategies to make your paintings more interesting and dramatic, such as simplifying the foreground, composing with abstract shapes and harmonizing colors.   • Discover speci?c techniques for painting landscape elements including mountains, water, foliage, snow and more.   • 9 step-by-step demonstrations walk you through all the techniques necessary to create successful landscape paintings.Landscape Painting Essentials is packed with practical information. You'll make the critical shift from painting what you see to painting as an artist sees. You'll learn to strategically edit shapes, rearrange elements and enhance color. You'll gain a better understanding of what to include in your painting, what to change and what to leave out. Most importantly, you'll gain the skills necessary to turn nature's bounty of inspiration into original, stunning landscape paintings.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

379 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 24, 2015

Reviews

[Wriothren · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a lot of useful tips in this book, but the author is very opinionated to the point of being misleading. This is not a book that will teach you how to paint, but it will teach you the author's sensibilities regarding landscape painting. I agree on some points that are probably widely accepted (don't paint individual blades of grass in a landscape), but some other points are just pure opinion—the author states that everyone prefers warm colors in paintings to cool colors in paintings, and I disagree entirely. And because I would need to be included for "everyone" to agree, it's just not true. I think this book should have been called "What Animated Backgrounds Look Like", because the author explicitly states that your painting should have this aesthetic. I kept getting the feeling I was looking at hotel art as I read this, and when he wrote about animated backgrounds, I felt I must be right.

I don't have the same taste as the author, but some good, solid fundamental guidelines are in this book. Please take it with a shaker of salt.

[Randolph King · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author has studied many paintings to gather what he believes are the essential rules of composition. He presents these as simple rules and provides examples of their use. He also has several step-by-step painting examples that expand on the compositional instruction he's providing.

The book is composed of seven chapters which collect different concepts based on the chapter heading. These include (roughly) how we see, abstract shapes, color theory, movement, simplify, shape repetition and depth. The top of each page is further color coded to help finding sections of the book.

Overall, the book is excellent. It is easy to read. The examples really help teach the subject and make the concepts stick, I feel just reading this book will improve my composition in both plein aire and working from reference material. I believe a second reading will help even further.

[Peter Herrmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Practical. Useful. Finally an art instructional book that I can use. I almost gave up on this genre because so many turn out as more showcase (for their authors' artwork) than useful instruction. Here, the author's insights and tips are profuse and profound. Many/most of these insights and tips I've not seen elsewhere (maybe I was looking in the wrong books), but they seem so obvious after this author's presentation of them (like Columbus and the egg) - all presented with numerous examples. This is a good book to own (imho). For my own in progress paintings, trying to absorb all the info from this book is too much at once: will probably pick 1 or 2 key tips from each chapter to try out, and then - over time - try to absorb/apply other of the tips.

[Carrie Polster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific art book!

This is a how to book designed to help artists with very necessary knowledge. Extremely helpful, I will read again and follow along in his step by step instructions.

[Michele Girard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful book.

Easy to understand tips on composition, aerial perspective etc. With clear examples and tutorials. Good for beginners and intermediate painters.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of painting techniques and overcoming common problems in painting.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful lessons.