Ready to Paint: Roses in Watercolour

Janet Whittle is a professional artist and qualified teacher who specialises in flowers and landscapes in watercolour and pastel. She exhibits regularly at the Westminster Galleries in London, and has also shown her work at the prestigious Mall Galleries and other international venues. Greeting cards bearing her work are widely available in Europe and the US and her prints are sold throughout the world. Janet Whittle has received awards from the major UK art groups, including the Society of Botanical Artists' Founder President's Honour in 1999, and the St. Cuthberts Mill Award for a picture of outstanding quality in 2001. Also in that year she won The Society of Flower Painters' Award for Excellence for their Jersey Exhibition.

• * Go straight into painting: no need to draw!* A tracing for each project and a free bonus tracing* Over 150 step-by-step photographs * Transfer the image, follow the detailed demonstrations, and paint beautiful pictures with confidence

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.-Artbookreview.net As ever in the Ready to Paint series there are tracings of the artworks used in the book so that the student can concentrate on the techniques used. This is useful for those people who worry about getting the drawings right before even picking up a paintbrush - this way they can concentrate on the painting part and have fun. That's what arts about for many of us isn't it? In this book Janet shows us some fabulous roses from a beautiful Maigold rose with a in rich vibrant colours working very wet in wet to dainty red roses set within a ring in the background which creates added interest to wonderful white roses where you can let your imagination have free rein on the background colours. Janet demonstrations are based mainly on wet in wet with flowers picked out and negative painting giving definition. Her advice is to "go with the flow" so to speak with watercolour as happy accidents can produce some pleasing results. I've some beautiful roses out in my garden at the moment and look forward to using Janets methods to paint them. I may use one of her tracings and simply adjust the colours to that of my own roses - that's the beauty of these books - you can follow explicitly or take part of the instructions and adapt them to create your own ideas. Super book on Roses for the watercolour flower painter.-JeannieZelos.com