Watercolor Painting Outside the Lines: A Positive Approach to Negative Painting

An outstanding book - so good our Art group have bought and received more copies. Negative approach aligns the brain in the same manner printmaking does. Would highly recommend this book to everyone but more towards those seeking an amazing direction.

I have been looking for a book just like this for a long time. I have always wondered why no one ever put out a watercolor book on negative painting. With this great book I believe I have found a path up the rungs of the ladder.

Many books that offer information to artists who wish to learn are a disappointment. Sometimes they promise more than they deliver. Not this book. It delivers more than it promises. I bought this book because I wished to learn about "negative painting," an elusive technique (to me), but I discovered that it could teach me much about watercolor techniques composition, drawing, color, and more as well. What I like best about this book are the writer's carefully worded and illustrated discriptions of technique. In my experience, the best ever. I have thought that this could be a book for a young person with no experience because it is so clear. I have a lot of experience, but I need this book. Mary Alice Strom

Negative space has long been one of my favorite art principles, but one that few artists truly seem to understand or take full advantage of. So when I saw the title of this book, I was more than a little intrigued. After pouring through this book, I was left with a lasting, positive impression. Linda Kemp not only understands negative space, but she capitalizes upon it to create bold, stunning and truly unique watercolor paintings. She offers the reader a wide array of creative ideas that develop negative space into focal centerpieces, and clearly explains the various techniques used to pull them off, such as developing lively, bold underpaintings as the basis for later paintings and how to create textures that further emphasize negative space. I am very impressed with this book. While the author's style of painting is quite different from my own, and may well differ greatly from your's, she offers many fun, exciting ideas to get the creative juices flowing, keep the process exciting and bring liveliness to into any style of painting. If you want to explore exciting ways to treat negative space, and have an interest in watercolor or other water media, this is definitely the book for you.

Linda Kemp's work is luminous and seems to float off the pages. She recommends EVERYONE to use the technique of painting negative space to improve their art. Negative painting is going AROUND the outline of a subject, the way you might lay down a leaf on a white sheet of paper. Then dab paint around it. Lift off that leaf and you have a white leaf floating on a colored ground.The book has the following chapters:Basic Painting Supplies Underpaintings - laying the groundwork Getting into Shapes - become aware of negative shapes! Working with Glazes and Building Layers Building Nature's Complex Shapes Picture Planning Made Easy Assembling the Pieces of the Puzzle The author says this technique applies to all media (certainly those who do charcoal or pastel are well aware of the importance of negative space, as are sculptors.) As a watercolorist, if you concentrate on line and wash, this will be quite revealing. In fact, this is probably a "must-have" on the technique bookshelf.