David Bellamy's Mountains & Moorlands in Watercolour

Dec 10

If you want your landscape paintings to pack a punch, tackling impressive views of towering mountains and bleak, windswept moors is a good choice of subject. In this book you can learn how to capture these inspiring images in watercolors.

Firstly, you can hear me cheering when I read that Mr Bellamy suggests buying student quality paints is a good plan for anybody starting out or practising. That is after all what they are for (there is a big clue in the name) and here is one of the very few art instruction primer writers to agree with me. This sets the tone for a sensible, realistic book that does not advocate buying everything in the store and which has good advice for outdoor sketching as well as working from photographs. I particularly like the two paintings showing how not to lay out a landscape, and what constitutes a well constructed picture. There are sections on how to draw the elements that make up this type of painting, from rocky textures to animals and human figures, trees, water and skies. As actually having a go is the best way to learn there are also several projects to work through, with step-by-step pictures with captions showing how the painting is built up and how to do the various effects. I enjoyed the way that such a daunting subject was broken up into manageable elements, with plenty of instruction on how to achieve them along the way. A useful addition to your bookshelf, which for once does not advocate breaking the bank!

David Bellamy was brought up and lives in Wales, so it is no wonder that he has always been fascinated by wild places.
Highly regarded as a teacher of art, David has a tremendous following among leisure painters, many of whom have attended his extremely popular courses and workshops both in the UK and overseas. He gives demonstrations and talks, has produced five successful videos on watercolour painting and is a regular contributor to Leisure Painter magazine.