"Many painters enjoy working outdoors when the weather is good (and they need to know how to deal with it when the weather changes)! This book includes the best instruction on the special challenges of painting landscapes outdoors from a variety of the best plein-air artists working today in all major media-oil, pastel, watercolor, acrylic and gouache. - Materials, site selection and practical tips - Values, shapes, composition, color and elements of landscape painting - Bringing outdoor studies back into the studio - Complete start-to-finish demonstrations - Hundreds of gorgeous images"--

For artists looking to grow beyond the studio, En Plein Air: Watercolor is the definitive resource for experiencing the rewards and invigoration of watercolor painting on location. En Plein Air: Watercolor introduces beginning artists and fine-art enthusiasts to the core concepts of painting on location. This guide will have you fully prepared for a day of painting outdoors. Inside, you'll find a comprehensive list of what to pack to maximize your time, learn how to choose a subject and interpret it for a composition, discover how to deal with the challenges of shadows and shifting natural light, and hone your watercolor techniques. The collection of step-by-step projects will help you gain new artistic skills as you create unique, dynamic artwork outside the studio. Perfect for artists looking to break outside the norm, En Plein Air: Watercolor is your complete guide to experiencing the unique rewards of painting on location with the invigorating medium of watercolor.

Paint with passion, purpose and pleasure What do you want your landscape painting to say about this place, this moment? How do you use the visual vocabulary - line, shape, value, color, edges - to say it? With this book, your conversation with nature will direct your brush. With an exhilarating, synergistic combination of indoor and outdoor painting, Kevin Macpherson shows you how to create personal, poetic landscapes that capture the feeling of being there. Learn how to: • Use a limited palette in a way that is more liberating than limiting • Experience nature to the fullest and capture its vibrancy back in the studio through photos, sketches and outdoor studies • Cope with the fleeting qualities of atmosphere and light by establishing a value plan early and sticking with it • Incorporate impressionistic touches of broken color to give your landscape a depth and vibrancy that enhances its realism • Approach painting as a layering and corrective process that encourages non-formulaic solutions Stimulating warm-up exercises in the studio prepare you for your adventures outside, while eight step-by-step demonstrations show you how to put these methods into action. Throughout, Macpherson's own light-filled landscapes illustrate the power of these techniques. Full of fresh air and fresh art, Landscape Painting Inside and Out will guide and encourage beginners while challenging more accomplished artists to bring greater vitality and a more natural, less formulaic finish to their paintings.

Because nature is so expansive and complex, so varied in its range of light, landscape painters often have to look further and more deeply to find form and structure, value patterns, and an organized arrangement of shapes. In Landscape Painting, Mitchell Albala shares his concepts and practices for translating nature's grandeur, complexity, and color dynamics into convincing representations of space and light. Concise, practical, and inspirational, Landscape Painting focuses on the greatest challenges for the landscape artist, such as: • Simplification and Massing: Learn to reduce nature's complexity by looking beneath the surface of a subject to discover the form's basic masses and shapes.• Color and Light: Explore color theory as it specifically applies to the landscape, and learn the various strategies painters use to capture the illusion of natural light.• Selection and Composition: Learn to select wisely from nature's vast panorama. Albala shows you the essential cues to look for and how to find the most promising subject from a world of possibilities. The lessons in Landscape Painting—based on observation rather than imitation and applicable to both plein air and studio practice—are accompanied by painting examples, demonstrations, photographs, and diagrams. Illustrations draw from the work of more than 40 contemporary artists and such masters of landscape painting as John Constable, Sanford Gifford, and Claude Monet. Based on Albala's 25 years of experience and the proven methods taught at his successful plein air workshops, this in-depth guide to all aspects of landscape painting is a must-have for anyone getting started in the genre, as well as more experienced practitioners who want to hone their skills or learn new perspectives.

Dust jacket notes: "Vibrant, fresh, immediate! The direct oil painting technique is an intense reaction to nature, a race with time to capture the color, the light and shadow, the design and the spirit of a subject in a few short hours. And now, Emile Gruppe - master of the direct oil painting technique - shows how you can use the broad strokes and lively colors of this spontaneous approach to infuse your own paintings with vitality, vigor, and on-the-spot freshness. A firm believer in using the best materials for the best results, Gruppe begins with a quick review of his favorite brushes, colors, easels, and painting surfaces. Next, he covers the basics of good design, what to look for and how to orchestrate what you see: masses, lines, values, and relationships. Turning to color, a fundamental element of his painting technique, Gruppe discusses complements, color harmony, color vibration, local color, reflected color, and using color to create atmospheric perspective. He explains how color appears on various kinds of days - foggy, clear, cloudy - and under different lighting conditions - front lighting, backlighting, sidelighting. In subsequent chapters, the author focuses on composing seascapes and landscapes; he explains how to paint rocks, ocean, lighthouses, boats, piers, pilings, roads, trees, streams, snow, mountains, valleys. Then, in full-color step-by-step demonstrations, the author shows how he captures a subject in his unique, exuberant, on-the-spot style.