The Landscape Painter's Workbook: Essential Studies in Shape, Composition, and Color

The Landscape Painter’s Workbook is the definitive hands-on guide to the time-honored techniques and essential elements of landscape painting.

Written by celebrated landscape artist, instructor, and author Mitchell Albala, this richly informative and beautifully illustrated volume leads you step by step through his approach to the genre, from establishing a composition using basic shapes to applying time-tested color strategies, with all-new lessons, practical exercises, and special topics, including:

• The Complete Color Strategy. What are the three aspects of color contrast that guide a painting’s strategy?
• Notan. Explore this special type of compositional study, which identifies the underlying shapes and patterns of a composition.
• Picture Formats. How does the picture format—horizontal, vertical, or square—affect the composition? What are the pros and cons of each?
• Color Grouping. A full chapter details this special practice, which helps maintain harmony by organizing colors into a limited number of groups.
• Composition. An in-depth review of variation, movement, and active negative space, with illustrations that diagram the action in each example.
• Workshop Exercises. Instead of demonstrations that show how the author paints, The Landscape Painter’s Workbook includes 10 skill-building workshop exercises to help you work through essential lessons on your own.

With examples of work by 45 contemporary landscape painters—more than 80 paintings in all—​in oil, acrylic, pastel, and watercolor, the lessons are suitable for all mediums. Each painting is thoroughly analyzed in terms of shape, composition, or color, with supporting diagrams, thumbnails, and photographs.

The Landscape Painter’s Workbook inspires and informs all artists, from aspiring to accomplished, on how to successfully portray the majesty and subtlety of the natural world.

The For Artists series expertly guides and instructs artists at all skill levels who want to develop their classical drawing and painting skills and create realistic and representational art.