Painting in Abstract by Carole Robson

Painting in Abstract by Carole Robson is a complete guide to capturing the abstract beauty of the natural world in mixed media projects. Carole’s book includes finished paintings and short exercises that encourage an experimental approach to painting the natural landscape.

Full of Carole’s enthusiasm for her art, this book will inspure you to celebrate the natural world in all its glory. Throughout the book Carole will guide you through a variety of different media combinations, including watercolour, gouache, acrylic paint and indian ink. She also goes on to explore other mediums and techniques, teaching you what will combine well and which will resist each other to create interesting and unexpected effects.

Carole offers up techniques for developing concepts and improving composition, with a chapter devoted to the basics of line, shape, colour, tone, texture and surface pattern. She’ll guide you through how to use all these elements to produce powerful work with impact. You’l discover exciting new techniques like washing and spraying, how to ue improvise mark-maing tools and preparing collage papers alongside other printing and stencilling methods.

The subjects of the exercises vary, from close-up details to more distant views, and celebrate everything from wild flowers and seed heads to berries and leaves. Carole takes an inquisitive look into overlooked ditches, hedgerows and verges, but also revels in the traditional beauty of flower-rich meadows. You’ll visit the tranquility of woodland scenes as well as the atmospheric wild of stormy skies and high seas.

This book offers an exciting route into creativity, whether you’re a beginner or an enthusiast.

128 page Paperback. 216 x 280mm.

LOOK INSIDE

• Introduction 6

• Framing the mind 8

• The formal elements 14

• Exploring your Materials 52

• Towards the abstract 62

• Irresistible Resists 70

• River Birds step-by-step project 80

• Layers 88

• Nocturne step-by-step project 94

• Collage and Print 102

• Autumn Seed Heads step-by-step project 116

• Afterword 124

• Index 128

Carole was brought up in a rural area of North Staffordshire. She moved South to study for her degree and post graduate qualifications at Central St. Martin's School of Art and subsequently freelanced as a book illustrator for major London Publishers. She worked on a wide variety of commissions and her illustrations are published worldwide. 

Carole is a mixed media painter and art tutor, working from her studio in Laddingford, Kent, she exhibits in London and the South East of England. Her paintings are driven by strong feelings about ecology and man's impact on the environment; her desire is to elevate nature's case and celebrate meadows and wild places. She has visited the Kent Wildlife reserve, Marden Meadow regularly for over thirty years, which is a rare, unimproved hay meadow connecting us back to a pre-industrial past. Distillation of these observations, memory and imagination form the basis of many of her landscapes. While inspired by all nature she particularly enjoys weedy patches and the fragility of weathered plants, which retain a kind of nobility in their structure even in their dry, decaying state. 

Carole is a mixed media painter with a first love of watercolour. She is experimental, combining media, resist techniques and a variety of mark making. In the last few years Carole has brought digital art into her practice and is frequently re-inspired by the new colour combinations or abstractions achieved.