Product Description

For more than 25 years, Arleta Pech has been dazzling the art world with her strikingly realistic watercolour compositions. Now artists can learn to utilise her trademark techniques by following this guide's complete demonstrations for painting irises, magnolias, roses, peonies, apple blossoms, tulips - even delicate china and lacework. Starting with the basics, beginners can learn to successfully render transparent petals, luminous colours and a variety of delicate floral shapes. In addition, readers will learn: - eight step-by-step demonstrations of luxuriant, finished paintings - shorter step-by-step demonstrations showing how to observe and paint each flower's "living presence" - glazing techniques for building depth of colour and three-dimensional form - tips on how to find inspiration, develop a composition, create a theme, and paint backgrounds

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #669485 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Arleta Pech is a renowned artist and teacher who has taught dozens of workshops at the Scottsdale Artists School. Her work was discovered by Mill Pond Press, and since that time she has travelled widely for gallery shows, tours, print signings and research trips.

Customer Reviews

How to paint beautiful florals for any artistic level
Arleta Pech's book is one of the best books on painting lush florals I have ever seen. This book is so good I later bought one of her video tapes to actually watch her creating a floral in her beautiful style. However, as long as you have this book you don't need a video. The book has everything you need to start painting using her techniques.

The first chapter gives information on materials, paints and surfaces. It also discusses looking for inspiration, developing the composition, creating paintings with a theme, creating a center of interest, detail drawing & use of a projector along with correcting the distortions that projection methods introduce.

The next chapter gets to the nuts and bolts of how she achieves her unique look. She discusses color theory particularly as it relates to glazing with watercolor. There are step-by-step photos showing her graded glaze technique and building form with it as well as her paint and pull technique. She shows the difference these techniques produce compared to wet-in-wet and provides some practice exercises with petals an iris and a bow. She also shows use of an airbrush which she uses mainly just to touch up & soften the center of a flower and occasionally to soften a background further.

The book has many step-by-step demonstrations of full paintings using her 2 favorite techniques as well as demonstrations of painting interesting backgrounds. There are many smaller demonstrations of just an individual flower. Interestingly, outline drawings are provided so you can trace the flower and practice painting it. She also uses lines pointing to particular areas of the outline drawing to remind you of certain areas to pay attention to.

Even though this is mainly a book about floral painting she provides demonstrations of painting china and lace since these items are often also featured in her floral still-lifes. One of the chapters shows step-by-step demonstrations of full scale paintings and a list beside each finished painting of problems that can crop up and their solutions. The final chapter is a gallery.

I have practiced painting some of the mini-demonstrations provided in the book and have been delighted with the results. Anyone wanting to paint better florals will benefit from this book.