The Flower Painter's Essential Handbook

A wonderful addition to my art bookshelf. I found The Flower Painter's Essential Handbook easy to follow, well illustrated in full color throughout and detailed.

This is an excellent book to learn watercolor flower painting with, and I love the loose, relaxed style of the 50 flowers you will learn to draw and paint. It is different from some other watercolor books I already own, and fills a nice gap in learning to vary painting styles. I really like it for it's simplicity and loose relaxing style, while at the same time, presenting about 50 different types of flowers to paint in a step-by-step fashion. It's a great book. It has drawing instructions for each flower, pointing out the details and things such as a folded or twisted petal, and how the bud attaches to the stem. Arrows explaining where the light and shadows fall and how to paint that are easy to follow. The palette for each painting is between 3 to 6 colors, which I also found nice. The washes and layering are also taught in an easy to follow manner. The book is almost completely devoted to 50 two-page exercises on painting 50 different flowers from letter A to W, and does not spend much time on presenting such things as color theory. I really like this book and recommend it to anyone who wants to learn and practice flowers in watercolors.