David Bellamy's Mountains & Moorlands in Watercolour
The popular artist, David Bellamy, has written and illustrated another fine book on watercolour painting, featuring the type of scenery for which he is renowned - mountains and moorland. It contains much valuable advice on selecting subjects, developing them and making the most of chromatic and tonal contrasts. He shows his readers how to tackle such features of mountain scenery as rocks, crags, water and foliage and how to develop the painting techniques required to capture them convincingly. His advice is down-to-earth, easy to follow and is richly illustrated by reproductions of many fine watercolour paintings and over 120 step-by-step demonstrations. He conveys a strong impression of distance by his use of colour - warm, rich tones for the foreground; cool blues and greys for the distance - and he captures a powerful impression of sheer size by placing minute figures against the massive mountain background. He offers useful advice on aerial perspective and shows how it conveys convincing impressions of distance. The author's style of painting has loosened a little and so captures the essence of his impressive subject matter. His readers will learn much from his helpful advice and even more from studying his watercolour technique. I warmly recommend it to all watercolourists interested in mountain scenery.-Ray Campbell Smith, Leisure Painter David takes us through painting beautiful dramatic yet tranquil landscapes in this book. He begins with some practical advice about finding subjects and sketching whenever possible little vignettes that may prove useful in a full work. His advice about using maps to locate hills, waterfalls and suitable parking spots is excellent and something i hadn't thought of, but would be very useful when in an unfamiliar area. There's advice on painting figures and animals to add interest or perspective to a scene and a bit about working from photographs.  Different parts of landscapes such as water, tree, buildings and crags are covered in their own topic. The practice gained working on these proves invaluable when working on the four demonstrations paintings that conclude the book. These are full of step by step in depth advice and tips to help the artist achieve the effects David has shown. I particularly love the dramatic mountains scenes and the advice on scale and painting snow and ice. Just looking at some of the illustrations makes me feel cold and wintry (of course the snow outside the window today adds to that effect!)  Davids love of the landscape shows through in this inspirational book, well worth buying if you love realistic landscapes.-Jeanniezelos.com If you want your landscape paintings to pack a punch, tackling impressive views of towering mountains and bleak, windswept moors is a good choice of subject. In this book you can learn how to capture these inspiring images in watercolors. Firstly, you can hear me cheering when I read that Mr Bellamy suggests buying student quality paints is a good plan for anybody starting out or practising. That is, after all, what they are for (there is a big clue in the name) and here is one of the very few art instruction primer writers to agree with me. This sets the tone for a sensible, realistic book that does not advocate buying everything in the store and which has good advice for outdoor sketching as well as working from photographs. I particularly like the two paintings showing how not to lay out a landscape, and what constitutes a well constructed picture. There are sections on how to draw the elements that make up this type of painting, from rocky textures to animals and human figures, trees, water and skies. As actually having a go is the best way to learn there are also several projects to work through, with step-by-step pictures with captions showing how the painting is built up and how to do the various effects. I enjoyed the way that such a daunting subject was broken up into manageable elements, with plenty of instruction on how to achieve them along the way. A useful addition to your bookshelf, which for once does not advocate breaking the bank!-Myshelf.com