Capture the Rich Textures of Nature, Step by StepCapture nature's beauty as you never have before. Beloved artist and teacher Claudia Nice leads you on an inspired journey through the great outdoors. With paints in hand, she shares with you her best techniques for creating landscapes that come alive with richness, depth and textured detail. Open this guide and start painting right away. As you follow engaging, step-by-step demonstrations and exercises, you'll learn to recreate the textural elements of a range of terrains and landscapes. Chapters include: Creative clouds and skies Majestic mountains, hills and mesas Texturing trees, trunks and foliage Rugged rocks and gritty gravel Transparent textures for rivers, falls and lakes Flowers of the field In a special section, Claudia covers basic texturing techniques with mini demos using lines, dots, bruising, scribbling, spattering, blotting, printing, stamping and more. From paints and pens to sponges, leaves and facial tissue, you'll explore all kinds of fun and inventive ways to create amazing textures. And to help you put it all together, Claudia includes her masterful advice for creating compositions using reference photos, field sketches and your own creative license. Each demonstration features a large image of the completed landscape, so you can see exactly how Claudia's methods work - from start to finish.

Claudia Nice shows you how to turn ink and watercolors into the coarse-barked trunk of an oak, or the burnished smoothness of brass, or the verdant velvet of moss. Or any of many other things. She shows you how to use dots, fine lines, brushstrokes, black and white, color--a mixture of mediums and techniques--to suggest:

• glass
• cast iron
• adobe and brick
• sunrise and sunset
• driftwood
• leaf textures
• basketry
• surf and ocean waves
• enamelware
• rainbows
• wood grain
• distant trees
• eggs and onions
• animal hair
• and dozens of other textures

Nobody captures seascapes quite like Claudia Nice. In this guide, she shares her approach to creating dynamic watercolor compositions textured with pen & ink, acrylics and gouache. More than 60 step-by-step demos, simple enough for beginners, teach how to create all sorts of beach scenery, from waves crashing, to people relaxing while the sun slowly sets, and more.