Artist's Photo Reference: Water & Skies

I love the Artist's Photo Reference series. Water and Skies by Bart Rulon was the last one that I bought, because it's out of print and the price of used copies has been soaring. I kept putting it off in favor of less expensive used copies of other books in the series, even though Water and Skies covers a subject I love to paint. Finally the price dipped under $30 again and I ordered immediately. From the photos on the cover, I thought most of it would be clouds and open water without land, but there are some gems in this volume that I know I'm going to use to create spectacular landscapes. I liked the swamp section a lot. I finally found a reference for cypresses in standing water for a traditional New Orleans style Swamp Scene and I found egrets on another page -- both elements I needed for this planned work right in the same volume. The photos in this book range through a wide variety of subjects and the text is fine. The lessons are interesting and as with all the Artist's Photo Reference series, are each in different mediums by different artists to give any reader ideas for new techniques and mediums. I enjoyed it so much, and have the pure satisfaction of seeing the stack of Artist's Photo Reference books get as complete as possible. I hope that North Light Books continues the series and would really like one that took the artist under the water to see tropical reefs, fish and animals under the water. Any of this series are immensely useful for an artist. The title says it all. That is what it is -- a hardback book full of photo references to use for painting and drawing. The text itself is relatively short, the lessons are interesting but the meat of the book is the hundreds of excellent photographs of different weather, different climates, water in all its states. You can find what you need in this one for any landscape you'd like to draw -- including that traditional Swamp Painting that I know I'm going to do.

I just absolutely love this book. I bought this with the Landscape part of the series, with the hope to get more water. This book has it. It has a wonderful selection of snow scenes and even frost!!! It then has several different types of beach and ocean scenes. The one thing that I was really looking for that this book didn't have, which is why I gave it a 4, was that there was no rain. There were plenty of fog and mist, which were wonderful, but not a single rain picture. They had a few rainbows, but no rain. I thought it was interesting, but perhaps its just really that hard to take a picture of rain. So if your looking for a book with rain, I would suggest looking elsewere. If your just looking for a great book with lots of water and sky, this would be my pick!!

What a fantastic book! The photos and the art are all Breathtaking. Its a must for any landscape artist's book shelf. I've used it time and time again.