Product Description

A practical, stimulating and superbly illustrated book for intermediate watercolourists who are looking for greater challenges in their work and who are prepared to experiment with this popular medium. Shirley Trevena's watercolours are visually inspiring, vibrant with colour and strong in composition. This book shows what stunning results she achieves and how she does it by taking risks with watercolour. Although watercolour can be a difficult medium to handle, Shirley maintains that you get the best results if you have no sense of fear and just let yourself enjoy watercolour's fascinating versatility. Taking you through her paintings from the first concept to the finished watercolour, Shirley explains and illustrates her prize-winning techniques for producing luminous and colourful watercolours. She covers a wide range of topics, encouraging the reader to experiment with vibrant colour, dynamic composition, tone, and bold textures and patterns to produce exciting still life, landscape and flower paintings. She also explains what to do if things go wrong, and how to develop your paintings successfully and move on in your work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5938 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

About the Author
Shirley Trevena is a successful watercolour artist, internationally renowned for her paintings of still life, flowers and landscape imagery. She is a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and has won several watercolour awards -- the Winsor & Newton Award and the Llewellyn Prize. Shirley regularly runs painting workshops and exhibits her work annually at the Mall Galleries, London, and The Orange Steet Gallery, Rutland.

Customer Reviews

inspirational stuff
A truly inspiring book giving an insight into how Shirley Trevena works. Dont buy it if youre looking for a step by step guide to producing a painting- this book is all about giving you the confidence to explore your own style rather than trying to use standard techniques to achieve a `result` as so many other books do.
As a practising artist,I found the book fascinating and a real insight into the authors methods of painting. It fired me up to try new ideas and could do the same for you !

A lovely book and a must-buy for any aspiring watercolourist
This is a beautiful book full of pictures of Shirley Trevena's unique and wonderful paintings. Those familiar with her work will also be pleased to see some of her less-known subject matter, such as figures, and landscapes, as well as her fantastic flower and still life paintings. Shirley's rule-free and try-it anything-goes approach to painting is very liberating and inspirational as are the pictures in the book themselves. I was interested to hear the story of how she began painting with watercolours and her initial tribulations with this difficult medium, and this was very heartening for those of us still struggling. You won't regret buying this book.

A beautiful book
This is simply a beautiful book. I have long admired Shirley Trevena's work, and was so pleased to see a book from her at last. It does not disappoint.
An artist myself for many years, normally a lover of landscapes and abstract art, this book comes near the top of my list for anyone who is serious about their painting - well, even if not, still buy it for the inspiration.
Shirley takes the most difficult of mediums, watercolour, and works magic with it. She takes the most deadly of subjects, still life, and makes it vibrantly interesting. She breaks all the rules of perspective, technique (backruns and blobs look beautiful), and truly does take risks. The results are amazing - despite having bought the accompanying video, and read the book from cover to cover, I know that I could never produce work like this if I tried for the rest of my life. Normally this would put me off buying a book, yet here the work is not 'looking down on us from a great height'; the subjects are familiar, it looks as though it MIGHT be achievable - at some undefined point in the distant future!
This is not a book for the beginner - it doesn't take you through the usual range of exercises designed to start you off in watercolour. There are thousands of books out there that will do that, (and you still won't be able to do it!)
The author is an artist of great ability and experience. She does not patronise the reader, is honest about showing us the way she works, the little tricks she might use to get the effect she wants - without being at all gimmicky. Her work might look as though she has thrown it all together in a few hours, but this is very far from the case.
She is still developing new ways of working, going in new directions,(landscape, printmaking), even returning to her beginnings as a figure painter. I hope she will continue to produce these fabulously unique and inspirational watercolours as well.
Buy the book! You can't fail to love it.