This was the book that completely changed the way I paint.

Now, you might not be able to tell this at all from looking at my art. My work is nothing like Ms. Ross¹s work in either style, subject matter, or execution. However, this book really opened me up to new ways to mix the media I'd been working in, and helped me find a balance between texture and detail that I¹d never been able to quite reach before.

In this book, Ms. Ross shows her technique blending pen and ink, watercolor, colored pencils, and one or two colors of acrylics used as a resist to create amazingly detailed paintings full of light and color. Her focus leans towards garden scenes and cute, fuzzy animals, but her methods can be used for nearly anything.

She starts by laying in the darkest values in ink. Then starts to build up, usually from dark to light, with watercolors, using little daubs of color. This is quite a bit different from most watercolor techniques, which go from light to dark. Many people will find this method a bit easier to grasp. She then goes in and adds detail with colored pencils. Going back and forth with the watercolors to get everything just right.

In the opening sections of this book Ms. Ross gives many good suggestions about how to work, what materials to purchase Her list of necessarywatercolors is the best I¹ve seen, and got me through many paintings before I started to want a few more colors to work with. I still own very few watercolors, compared to what I thought I would need. And her list of specific colors kept me from wasting money buying a set full of colors I won¹t ever use. Her technique also focuses quite a bit on rendering the shadows an object casts, rather than the object itself. Her method of "seeing" is quite a bit like the Impressionist¹s goal of painting the light, rather than the subject in a scene, however she uses this method of seeing to create extremely realistic images.

Her choice of subject matter, covered in a few different sections, may lack interest for a lot of fantasy artists, but she covers all of the necessary textures that the fantasy artist needs. She covers interiors, including a scene lit by a fireplace, gardens, pets and wild animals. With enough imagination, this can give the fantasy artist a good knowledge of how to paint a realistic looking world for their imagined visions to move around in. She even covers fabrics in the demos with cushions and quilts. So you might need to look hard and think hard to work out how these techniques might be used for fantasy work, but this book is a very valuable tool if you can work out how to use it with your own style and subject matter.

As I said earlier, my work looks nothing like Ms. Ross¹s. I do not slavishly follow the techniques she shows in this book. For one, the paintings she demonstrates here are far too dependent on having a single photograph to work from, for my tastes. When I work from photos, I usually use anywhere from five to ten or more to piece together the look that I want, and unlike the techniques displayed in this book, I never stick exactly to the images in the photos, but alter them quite a bit. However, practicing Ms Ross¹s techniques can show you what to look for in a photo, and how to organize your painting into a good value scale. My work is also much looser than the work in this book, made of the tiniest little daubs of paint. The concepts in this book are still valuable, and seen with an open mind, can be extremely flexible.