A Look at Roger Coleman's watercolor book, Downland: A Farm and a Village

Hello everyone, Brian, here again today. I want to share one of my favorite

watercolor

book

s with all of you. I mean, it's not even really a

watercolor

book

per se, it's not like an instruction book or a process book, it's a watercolor illustrated book. by Roger Coleman and I don't know this artist. I can't find any more information about him on the web, so if anyone knows who this artist is and where there is more of his work, I would love to know anyway. he called the land a

farm

and a

village

and this book is the account of his family in the 1970s when they moved from London to a

farm

in Berlin and I don't know where Birbhum is.

I'm in the US so maybe some of you in the UK know where it is but I guess it's a smaller farming type of community but this book is the account of how his family moved to that community and everything he documented everything with watercolor illustrations and they are just beautiful, this book came out in 1981 and I noticed that it is available in many places online, maybe like B e.com. Abe com has lots of copies of this for very very cheap prices, as does amazon.com, but I thought I'd go anyway. through and I just show you a lot of these paintings that he did now.

I guess the reproductions in this book I don't think probably show the full range of values ​​of the original paintings and they

look

a little faded. and warm to me, so I guess there's more great stuff in the paintings, I don't know for sure but that's my assumption from reading this book, but they're just beautiful there, they're almost like Andrew Wyeth in a way in their tones and your theme and I love how it leaves a lot of unfinished areas and what I'll do is just skim through here quickly, there's more unfinished stuff going on in this. area I have a few tabs of things that I definitely want to show you.

This is a portrait of a guy named George. I thought he

look

ed a lot like the artist James Gurney in you know, at this point or in this painting. The more I portray someone named Libby, in this book there are also a lot of pencil drawings, very nice loose washes, what's going on around the cow, there are a lot of illustrations of farm equipment and a lot of the people who lived in this community. I think this is a representation of the same path in different seasons, so maybe this is snow and this is spring, something like that, he does it several times in the book, but they're just, I don't know, I just think they're beautiful. paintings with pencil sketches. another depiction of the same scene in different seasons this is kind of a two page spread of his wife there is a painting of her there and some sketches of her and her children are two girls more sketches and paintings of her daughters and I like this type of unfinished quality that's happening in some of these areas and sketches, you know, a painting there.

I'm not sure whether to go through the entire book or just show you the highlights, but I'll try to go over quickly here, just a beautiful behemoth. two page scene there, he just you know I love this loose stuff that he has around the edges and stuff that seems to have the perfect balance between very loose, washed out areas with more accurate representations of things in certain areas, it's just I like it. this really nice balance of loose but also precise study of some tree branches. I really like this one from what I assume is a children's class.

It's just a kind of ordered composition of early ordered painting like these two. paintings of his daughters, but it is a beautiful painting, they are more pencil sketches of various people. I really liked this page because it has a boy on it and it looks like an old Batman suit, you know, from the late, probably late '60s. I guess, but again, this is very accurate in terms of, you know, I don't want to call it photographic, but it also has some looseness to it, you know, if you look, there are unfinished areas down here and kind of eNOS wash in some areas some more pencil sketches here is one of his portraits that I really love and this is one of the things that make me think the problem is that this, but the reproductions in this book are probably not very accurate. the originals, I imagine there are probably some darker values ​​in the original painting and probably a fuller range of colors, but I don't know, I mean, it's just my instinct, but I think this is a gorgeous portrait.

I like the lost and found Nasarah line in the background I love that loose one, just the line, the brush strokes and the wet on wet things that happen in that background, there is another portrait, a couple more portraits, nice feeling of light and some of these again, really like this one, I like it, you know there's unfinished stuff, you can see his pencil lines where he was designing the tree part of this machine, but you know it works, it's like you, I don't, Anyway, I don't look. I look at it and think I wish I had finished it.

I think it's really cool that there's that kind of thing in another nice, loose big portrait. This is kind of a two page spread of some people working with hay bales. one with a great sense of light in this frame in the middle of the composition, they are almost all the way here. I think I've shown you practically every page, but I don't know how when I go to my collection of watercolor books to get inspiration or to encourage me to start painting. This is one I go to a lot. It's like I said. It is not an instruction book.

It is not a "You know how to paint" book. it's just you know, a collection of beautiful watercolors that represent the life they moved into, kind of an unfinished thing. I said this is still available and it's kind of a neat little portrait. I love all the empty space here and then the face peeking out of the frame there, but like I was saying, this is, you know, a used one. The book came out in 1981. I checked that there are quite a few copies of you. I bought this one at a library sale here in town for three dollars probably 20 years ago and they aren't much more expensive than that one. the ones I saw online, so if you are interested in this book I say go for it, it's very inspiring, it's a great book to read, thanks for watching and I'll be back with more videos soon.