This best-seller reveals the secrets of capturing the essence of a scene using abstract techniques, from pouring inks and adding opaque lines to using crinkled wax paper as resists and collaging paintings together.

Whether you are painting the spirit of nature -- or painting nature with a free spirit -- the keynote of this book is experimentation & keeping an open mind. Painting a scene exactly as it appears to the eye, as a realist landscape artist does, is only one of the many ways to capture nature. Masterfield demonstrates basic techniques for achieving texture, color mixtures, & shapes. Shows you new ways to work in watercolor -- by pouring inks, adding opaque lines to textured passages, using crinkled wax paper as resists -- & describes ways to collage several paintings together into an exciting work of art. Color & B&W illustrations.

“Quoting seminal figures....Darke reexamines the pertinence of arts and crafts ideals for our own gardens...[and] sidebar boxes...suggest[ing] specific plants and planting methods, and types of materials and decorative embellishments. A bevy of beautiful photographs illustrates Darke’s thoughtful and inspiring ruminations.”—Booklist.

Walking one day in the woods behind her cottage in Devon, nature illustrator and blogger Jo Brown became captivated by the sight of a Green Dock Beetle on a leaf and took a photograph of it in order to be able to draw it. That first tiny emerald bug was followed by more insects, and then birds, fungi, plants and flowers. The result is Secrets of a Devon Wood, a rich illustrated memory of her discoveries in the order in which she encountered them, so that the book flows smoothly with the seasons and the emergence of different wildlife. In enchanting, minute detail she zooms in on a bog beacon mushroom, a buff-tailed bumblebee, or a native bluebell. And she notes facts about their physiology and life history: "The flowers are narrow & darker than H. hispanica & H.x. mossartiana," she writes. "Drooping stem. Almost all flowers are on one side. Sweet scent." This journal is a treat for the senses, both a hymn to the intricate beauty of the natural world and a quiet call to arms for all of us to acknowledge and preserve it. It is a book that will stay with you long after you finally put it down

Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. 12 illustrations.