Customer Reviews

Painting the Secret World of Nature

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gorgeous nature artwork. The frog is exceptional. Agnew's rendering of translucent animal skin, dewdrops and leaves is miraculous, but you won't learn how exactly to airbrush those types of things. How the works get from roughed-in ideas to detailed airbrushed plant foliage is NOT well-documented here. If you want to learn how to do detailed airbrushing, this is not the book for you. But if you want to be inspired by some great technique and learn some of it (for example, how to do translucent effects) this book is excellent.

There are many good books on nature; there are many good books on art; there are many good instruction manuals. John Agnew's "Painting the secret world of nature" is a rare book that excels in all three of these.

Beginners as well as experienced artists will find this book both technically helpful and aesthetically pleasing. Its clear-cut instructions and step-by-step illustrations, showing the process of creating and elaborating a visually striking image, will help a practicing artist to improve the technique of realistic painting.

All professional artists have their own trade secrets; few are willing to share them; even fewer are able to do it in a way that makes sense to others. John Agnew's book is the one that does it superbly.

For the realist artist this book is great! Altho' Mr. Agnew's main interest is in painting exotic animals and places, many of his technics can be used for other realistic painting. I highly recommend this book.

In my experience, the vast majority of instructional books on realist painting of nature are by people who are have surprisingly little ability to paint the natural world realistically. Most books of any lasting worth deal primarily with drawing, and the majority of those were written before 1920. Finally, a book by a true master (if you doubt this look closely at the cover art) using contemporary materials and methods, and with a modern sensibility.

I guess it is not surprising that someone who can paint with such precision and clarity can also provide clear instruction. Perhaps I've run across a fair amount of what is covered in this book in various other books, magazine articles, etc. Still, the quality of the associated art in those other sources often did not inspire great confidence, the usable portion often had to be sifted out from a lot of plain rubbish, and worst of all the very fact of it being so scattered made it almost impossible to get a clear overview of the entire painting process. In this book the artwork inspires confidence (even awe), and the painting process is explained precisely and illustrated with excellent photographs.

John Agnew's book covers the two subjects most relevant to a work like this: the painting process as a whole and specific painting techniques for various subjects. Obviously it cannot cover every relevant subject in depth, and some major topics (like perspective) are discussed with interesting insight but also with extreme brevity. That's not really a criticism, since taking the space to more thoroughly examine even a few more subjects would have made the book prohibively expensive. Even though it does not and cannot cover everything in depth, if I had to have only one book on painting the natural world this would be it. This is also one to buy hardbound.

I hope this work gets the kind of readership it deserves. Perhaps then we could get another book by Mr. Agnew just on light and perspective. His command of these is stunning, and most references on perpsective apply more to architecture and engineering than to the natural world, where it is much harder to master.