Dreamscapes: Creating Magical Angel, Faery & Mermaid Worlds in Watercolor
Stephanie Pui-Mon Law
Impact
Nonfiction, Art
Themes: Faeries and Kin, Fantasy Races, Ghosts and Spirits, Merfolk, Religious Themes
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Description
Covering faeries, angels, and mermaids, this book teaches how to make fantastic humanoids glow with life in watercolor. Aside from the basics, she also covers embellishments, backgrounds, and watercolor techniques.
Review
I have a few books which cover fantastic humanoids, but this is the only one I have that delves deeply into mermaids and angels as well as the usual pixies and faeries. Her sections on embellishments - creating translucent wings for faeries, adding fins and skin textures to mermaids, deciding on wing proportions for faeries - are excellent, and her paintings do indeed glow with that light only skilled watercolor artists seem able to accomplished. (I've never gotten along with watercolors, so I can only sit on the sidelines and dream, here.) I wish she'd gone a bit more into perspective and anatomy, showing some of the musculature and bone structures which she mentions adapting for various faefolk and such, but you can't really have everything in one book. Assuming that the artist/reader has some basic skills to build on - painting and drawing - this is an excellent instruction book, and certainly inspiring even for those of us who can't get watercolor to work worth a darn for us.