The Little Book of Rock Painting: More than 50 tips and techniques for learning to paint colorful designs and patterns on rocks and stones (The Little Book of ...)

by F. Sehnaz Bac, Marisa Redondo, and Margaret Vance

Filled with creative exercises, art prompts, templates, and step-by-step projects, The Little Book of Rock Painting encourages interactivity for immediate results, while teaching beginners the fundamentals of the medium in an engaging and fun way.

In The Little Book of Rock Painting, aspiring artists will discover how to gather and prepare their rocks to create masterpieces that are truly one with nature. Written and illustrated by three talented rock-painting artists, the book features a range of contemporary designs to experiment with, from patterns and animals to mandalas and dots. The instructions are easy to follow and invite creativity and originality.

Grab your colors, head outside, and start painting beautiful works of art on stones!

The Little Book of ... series focuses on delivering fun, approachable, and interesting art instruction in a fresh, portable format. With its contemporary design, open practice pages, creative exercises, and prompts that encourage interactivity, beginning artists learn the fundamentals of their craft, often with immediate results.
 
Also available from the series:The Little Book of Sketching, The Little Book of Lettering & Word Design, The Little Book of Manga Drawing, The Little Book of Cartooning & Illustration, and The Little Book of Drawing Dragons & Fantasy Characters.

• ISBN13: 9781633227316
• Publish Date: 30 April 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Walter Foster Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 128
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Little Book of Rock Painting is a new tutorial guide to designing and creating art on stone surfaces. Expected release date 30th April 2019 from Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint. It's 128 pages and available in paperback format.

This is a really well photographed book and the tutorials are clearly written and illustrated. I am by no means an accomplished artist and the instructions were well within my confidence level as a beginning 'doodler'. The resulting projects are attractive (see cover). The mandala and petroglyph paintings were especially appealing to me.

There's an introduction with materials and how-to's as well as a short section on sourcing and choosing rocks for projects. The author covers preparation and several different prepping methods for making a good and durable base for painting. There's a good chapter section on different paints, inks, and other media as well as tips for different shading and surface effects.

The intro is followed by large tutorial chapters roughly grouped by theme: patterns (mandalas and petroglyphs), animals (including a ton of beautiful stylized owls which I will be doing), and monochrome designs which remind me a lot of 'tribal' tattoos which are very popular.

The book does include templates for the projects as well as some inspiration photos and a short author bio.

There is no resource/link list or index. Neither of these detracts from the value of the material in my opinion, since a simple Google search can give you links and the table of contents is very detailed (and it's a short book).

Five stars. This would make a lovely weekend family project or a really cool 'tie-in' hobby for gardeners, rockhounds, collectors, etc.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes