May 102013
Brave Intuitive Painting-Let Go, Be Bold, Unfold!: Techniques for Uncovering Your Own Unique Painting Style
Adopt a spontaneous, bold, and fearless approach to painting as a process of discovery—one that results in lush and colorful finished works that will beg to be displayed. This inspiring and encouraging book for both novice and experienced painters teaches how to create colorful, exciting, expressive paintings through a variety of techniques, combining basic, practical painting principles with innovative personal self-expression.Flora S. Bowley’s fun and forgiving approach to painting is based
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Mixed Feelings,
This book is visually beautiful and the author does a good job of describing her approach to “painting as a process of discovery”. She has a calm and encouraging writing voice.
There is not a lot of instruction in this book, compared to most art instruction books. Some might call that lack of substance; others would call it elegant simplicity. The author is all about right-brain and intuition, so maybe she intentionally kept the words to a minimum.
There were some aspects of the book that disappointed me. First, the paper the book is printed on has a flat matte finish (not shiny). This has the effect of making the illustrations less vibrant than they could have been.
I was puzzled by the inordinate amount of space devoted to large life-style photos, at the expense of actually illustrating the text. Even when there are illustrations of the text, there are no captions so you have to guess which concept or technique the illustration refers to.
If you are wondering what I mean by “life-style photos”, here are a few examples: a full page photo of the author doing yoga, another full page of the author swinging on a swing, and a page that has nothing on it except a photo of a candle and a short quotation.
There are also some odd choices such as the (presumably intentional) out-of-focus close-up of a painting detail that takes up most of pages 18 and 19. I was left scratching my head asking “What does that add?”
The part of the book that I found the most interesting is a series of 20 photos that show the author creating a painting from start to finish. But ironically (considering how much space is lavished on irrelevant life-style photos), the amount of space devoted to those 20 photos is two pages in total! Each photo is only about two inches square, and there is no explanatory text.
What a missed opportunity! I wish the book designers had devoted more space to that process. I realize that the author did not want to write a “how to paint like me” book. But it would have been interesting and helpful to 1) be able to see the photos without squinting, and 2) have some explanatory text to go along with those photos.
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|An Inspirational Art Book,
Customer Video Review Length:: 1:17 Mins
This book was an Amazon recommendation and I went in blind since there was no “look inside” feature; I decided to invest because I researched the author and found that I enjoyed her style, artwork, and energy. That said, this book certainly won’t be everyone’s flavour.
It focuses on aligning mind, body, and spirit more than on painting pictures. And the pictures you’re asked to produce aren’t necessarily photorealistic (or even illustrative), more ambiguous–almost abstract.
The book begins with a basic introduction and offers some advice on treating yourself gently, then it gets into a list of supplies:
* Painting surface*
* Acrylic paint
* Palette (not to be confused with ‘colour palette’)
* Foam brushes
* Small bristle brushes
* Fingers
* Rags
* Etchers (anything that can scratch or make marks on the painting surface)
* Stampers (anything that can be pressed onto the painting surface)
* Spray bottles
(And a personal suggestion: a basic colour wheel if you don’t already own one.)
Each section which discusses the individual supplies offers some prompts on how to use it, such as (taken from the section under “Small Bristle Brushes”):
*Play with creating thick and thin marks in one continous line
*Skip the brush across the canvas to make smaller hash marks
*Write the first word that comes to mind
However, from section to section, some of these prompts overlap. I also noticed some repetition throughout, especially when it came to (literal) movement.
Since the style is also about painting big (*she recommends at least 30″x30″ surface to start, and doing two+ paintings at a time) and going bigger (she recommends a 36″x36″ glass palette), it would be helpful to have either a dedicated art studio or enough space in your room to fully express the suggestions offered in the book.
While the *essence* of the book (i.e. paint from intuition) may be adapted for other mediums such as oil or watercolour or pastel, this book is all about acrylics because of how easy layering acrylic is–and the style is all about layering.
There isn’t much advice on paint selection other than “experiment”. This is both good and bad–if you already have some experience with acrylics, you probably already know which paints you like best; if you’re brand new, then you can be overwhelmed by the choices (some of which are truly expensive).
The brief section on colour/theory/mixing is nothing new if you’ve taken an art class or two, but definitely a great refresher and broken down into easily understood terms. I loved how she broke down the “colours that don’t make mud” and “colours that make mud” sections.
Aside from that, she offers exercises to help you connect with your inner self to include stepping away from the work and literally moving your body, or dance while you paint, or paint blind-folded. However, she doesn’t offer much by “how-to”–it’s basically a go-with-your-gut thing.
At the end she offers a series of stills of her painting a picture from beginning to end. When I reached this section I was a bit disheartened. Sure it was nice to look at, but I wish it was granted its own chapter with larger photos and maybe some commentary on her in-the-moment process.
If you go in expecting a workshop or a step-by-step painting guide, you’ll be disappointed. Mostly, this is an inspirational art book that offers a new way to approach painting. It won’t teach you how to paint pictures like Flora Bowley, but it may help you better paint pictures like *you*, or, at very least, shed a few painting inhibitions.
I hope this review was helpful to you, but if I’ve overlooked something or you have a question about my experience with this book, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.
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|Too Much Psychobabble not enough technique,
I was disappointed..the first 40+ pages were just “Life Coach” type phrases from other people & photos of the author in various yoga poses, etc; I expected more substance & guidance on technique and instruction. After viewing the authors web site, I expected more. She is very talented, but I could have done with less of the trite little phrases and more about actually working on unique painting styles. If I had been able to view this book online, I would not have purchased it. I plan to return it.
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