I admire the organisation that has gone into producing this book. Obviously not easy to shepherd a series of paintings through a group of individual artists...each with their own foibles and preferences and come up with a coherent and logical book at the end of the process.
Margaret Stevens is obviously a well organised person and probably has some "clout" as the president of the Botanical Artist's Association. And has ...more or less pulled off the feat of delivering a book on botanical painting with a heavy emphasis on colour and the palette used to achieve this. Maybe not completely successful, because, to my eye, anyway, the gallery section at the end has far superior works to the "worked-up" examples in the main part of the book. (Indicating that we've been slightly shortchanged by being taken through somewhat more "pedestrian" works).
In some ways the book promises more than it delivers because when I skimmed though the book, prior to buying, I saw the range of palettes presented for each painting and assumed that they would be closely linked in the instruction. Whilst there is an attempt to do this I feel it fails. I'd far prefer to see the kind of worksheet that we see on p62 of "Botanical Illustration Course: with the Eden Project" by Rosie Martin...with all the false attempts and the testing of colours and re-working etc to get the right colour mix. Or, I'd like to see the colour mixes linked in directly to the painting at the various stages....rather than just having wordy descriptions such as "Brenda added a mixture of thin cadmium yellow with a tinge of permanent sap green .....allowing a hint of permanent rose to shine through". I guess, you get the general idea but I'd far prefer to see the mixed colour alongside the main painting illustrating just this technique.
Easy to criticise but really it's a very helpful book. Margaret approaches the colours in a systematic way from white to yellow, green blue, purple red, brown and black and works through individual examples of flowers with each of these colours. Though to be more direct, she has recorded the work of a range of individual artists as they paint the various examples. A great way to produce a book like this .....outsourcing the main toil. And there are a couple of coloured pencil artist featured as well...though no pastels.
Did I learn much? Not really. I'm currently trying to paint a dandelion inflorescence ....with the while silky bulbous head being blown away...and having trouble with the white inflorescence against the white paper. Thought I might get a few tips in the white section here but the best she says is that it's really important to get the grey tones right...or words to that effect.....and try your own grey mixes.
Overall, quite a useful book ...though I feel it could have been better. Four and a half stars from me. ( )