Watercolour Flowers || Janet Whittle

Janet Whittle has an approach to flower painting that is refreshingly original and really rather attractive. Rather than follow either the route of botanical illustration or the flower portrait, she combines the rather formal “floral” so beloved of American artists with a relaxed style that captures the essence of flowers rather than their every detail. It’s difficult to sum up, but try to imagine a tightly packed bed filled with blooms and you’ll have a rough idea.

The key to Janet’s style is negative shapes, all those parts which aren’t the main subject and, although these are not the main tenet of the book, you’ll find yourself learning a lot about them if you just follow what she does. The other thing she’s very good at is combining quite bright colours so that, even though the result is quite vivid, they don’t clash.

Always the problem with a very individual style is that to emulate it looks like copying and you’ll probably want to use this book for the information it provides on getting shapes and colours right rather that the overall result. However, this alone is worthwhile and Janet gives copious information on using tints, shading and gradation to produce flowers that look as if they’re actually growing rather than just being representations on a piece of paper.

This isn’t really a book for the beginner because you do need a reasonable facility both with the medium and the subject to take full advantage of it, but it’s one that would ideally suit someone who wants to take flower painting beyond that first stage and maybe even as a stepping stone to more formal work later.

	Watercolour Flowers Book (paperback) with Janet Whittle

Roses in Watercolour (Ready to Paint) || Janet Whittle

Some quite surprising developments have been taking place in this series of late. While it started off pretty much on-message with simple guides to straightforward subjects, some genuine little masterclasses have started appearing and this is definitely one of those.

This is amazing, not because the series is going off-message, but because it turns out to be possible to do it in a format that you’d think would always tend towards the elementary. You still have the pre-drawn tracings, but all of Janet’s final results here have the feeling of being freehand work. In truth, you couldn’t paint a convincing flower portrait without an initial sketch, but there’s absolutely no sense here of that having been filled in, which is really rather remarkable.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to a beginner in flower painting, but if you’re looking to develop skills and you want a bit of help getting the shapes right so that you can concentrate on the colours and shading, then this book is unique. In fact, even if you don’t use the tracings at all, Janet still has a huge amount to tell you.

	Ready To Paint Roses in Watercolour Book with Janet Whittle

Watercolour Landscapes Tips & Techniques

This is another of Search Press’s bind-ups of several titles from the same series. Once again, if you haven’t already got most of the titles included, it’s very good value.

For the record, what you get is:

Painting Landscapes & Nature by Richard Bolton
Painting Skies by Geoff Kersey
Painting Water by Joe Francis Dowden
Painting Flowers & Plants by Janet Whittle

The Tips and Techniques series is aimed at artists who already have a little experience and features specific topics and subjects for them to develop their style and technique. There are step-by-step demonstrations as well as analyses of completed paintings and the whole is nicely balanced.

	Watercolour Landscapes Tips & Techniques Book