Landscapes in Oil

This in-depth instructional book on landscape painting explains, illustrates, and reveals the highly guarded secrets and techniques of today's master painters who represent the bridge from the Classical era to the Contemporary era.

Landscapes in Oil inspires the reader with the works of luminaries such as Fredric Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Sanford Robinson Gifford, while also providing step-by-step instructions to their methods. Contemporary master Ken Salaz additionally uses his own paintings in progress to give readers the hands-on, step-by-step instruction they need to take a blank canvas to a finished work of art. The reader is guided with text and images illustrating the entire painting process.

Beginner painters are given the basic tools and visual examples they need to proceed on their own; intermediate painters are challenged and inspired with new, unpublished techniques and theory, enabling them to break through to their next level of painting; and advanced painters are also challenged and inspired, as all the instruction creates landscape paintings under unified theories and techniques.

The content and general approach start with classic examples of works and move on to materials, technique, and art theory (composition, colour, etc.). This is followed by illustrated exercises of copying masterworks for the purpose of elucidating and illustrating the application of the theories laid out in previous chapters. Included are dozens of complete step-by-step visual demonstrations of painting the different elements of the landscape, including trees, water, sky, and light. The book culminates in step-by-step visual demonstrations of plein air pieces and their translation into studio works of art. The book includes many examples of contemporary artists currently thriving in the art world within this tradition.