Have a quick flick through my new book. They have finally arrived and are being shipped out now.
John Lovett’s Textures, Techniques and Special Effects for Watercolor
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Category Archives: Books
LEONARDO VIA IPHONE
Back in the early 1500’s Leonardo Da Vinci was busy filling notebook after notebook with all his accumulated knowledge on painting, anatomy, mechanics, hydraulics and pretty well everything he observed. One of the greatest thinkers of the renaissance, Leonardo probably never imagined his notes would be translated, digitized and made freely available to artists in the 21st Century. Yesterday I downloaded iBooks to my iPhone, and there for free, in the iBooks download section, was “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci – Complete” thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg.
It makes fascinating reading and is packed with practical methods and techniques used by Da Vinci’s in his paintings and drawings.
Here is his technique for checking that a painted shadow is the right color.
“When you draw a figure and you wish to see whether the shadow is the proper complement to the light, and neither redder nor yellower than is the nature of the colour you wish to represent in shade, proceed thus. Cast a shadow with your finger on the illuminated portion, and if the accidental shadow that you have made is like the natural shadow cast by your finger on your work, well and good; and by putting your finger nearer or farther off, you can make darker or lighter shadows, which you must compare with your own.”
The complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci are freely available through the Project Gutenberg website. Downloadable in a number of formats all under 1.5MB
SMALL DREAMS
After a few months of editing, adjusting and tweaking, I have finally got this project off the ground.
It is a collection of photographs woven into a tale describing the thoughts and dreams of a dozen kids growing up in a rundown mining town on the fringe of a desert in outback Australia.
Hope you enjoy it.
THE RED HIGHWAY – Nicholas Rothwell
There was a review of Nicholas Rothwell’s book “The Red Highway” in the Weekend Australian a month or so before we left home. I read the review and thought it would be an interesting book to read while traveling.
I carted the book all the way up the Queensland coast, across the gulf and up the Stewart Highway to Darwin, where I finally began to read it.
Coincidently, the opening chapters of the book are set in Darwin, so as we are wandering around Stuart Park, Nightcliff, the Military Museum, Knuckey Street, all these places started to emerge from the book. I was starting to wonder at times if I had been to places or had just read about them.
We left Darwin and wound our way across to the Kimberley, and so did The Red Highway. Familiar places like the Gibb River Road, Mt Elizabeth, Gogo Station, Fitzroy Crossing were all popping up in the text as we made our way through what was left of them. The book also touched on the life of Maxine McDonald, a Kimberley personality we had drinks with on the verandah of Fossil Downs in the early 80’s. It was all quiet amazing, a book with so many twists and turns triggered by chance and coincidence should coincide so closely with our travels.
Beyond the geographic movements of The Red Highway are the mental dips and peaks. Traveling for a long period of time through this country seems to open up all sorts of strange mental doors. Rothwell sweeps you with him through these openings as he journeys from place to place.
There was a review of Nicholas Rothwell’s book “The Red Highway” in the Weekend Australian a month or so before we left home. I read the review and thought it would be an interesting book to read while traveling.
I carted the book all the way up the Queensland coast, across the gulf and up the Stuart Highway to Darwin, where I finally began to read it.
Coincidently, the opening chapters of the book are set in Darwin, so as we were wandering around Stuart Park, Nightcliff, the Military Museum, Knuckey Street, all these places started to emerge from the book. I was starting to wonder at times if I had been to places or had just read about them.
We left Darwin and wound our way across to the Kimberley, and so did The Red Highway. Familiar places like the Gibb River Road, Mt Elizabeth, Gogo Station, Fitzroy Crossing were all popping up in the text as we made our way through what was left of them.
The book also touched on the life of Maxine McDonald, a Kimberley personality we had drinks with on the verandah of Fossil Downs in the early 80’s. It was all quiet amazing, a book with so many twists and turns triggered by chance and coincidence should coincide so closely with our travels.
Beyond the geographic movements of The Red Highway are the mental dips and peaks. Traveling for a long period of time through this country seems to open up all sorts of strange mental doors. Rothwell sweeps you with him through these openings as he journeys from place to place and engages with many interesting characters.
The Red Highway is a great story, made even better for me, running parallel with its movements across Australia.
Splashing Paint 