Painting in Abstract: Mixed Media Techniques Inspired by the Natural World

Learn to capture the beauty of the natural world in paint and mixed media with this inspiring book.

Carole Robson shares her enthusiasm for the natural world and how to paint it in the abstract. This book guides the reader through simple combinations of media such as watercolor, gouache, acrylic and Indian inks in combination with other media for a dynamic and modern effect for your artworks.

It offers strategies for developing concepts and improving design, with a chapter devoted to using the formal elements - line, shape, color, tone, texture and surface pattern.

The book guides you through selecting a scene and how to organize your painting to achieve success. Carole Robson is a dynamic teacher who uses various media in combination with paint to show you how to show the natural world in all of its beauty.

Carole Robson studied for 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, who 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. 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.
Carole lives in Laddingford, Kent, UK.