Passport to Painting

$39.99

How to paint retro-style travel poster art by Susie West

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Book Description

Retro-style travel posters are optimistic, aspirational and unabashedly fun. This book teaches everything the reader needs to produce a contemporary twist on the travel posters of the past.

Stylish retro travel posters bring to mind summer holidays, happiness and fun. Perennially popular as wall art, their strong designs and clean, flat colours are perfect for hobby artists to emulate.

A complete guide to producing your own travel-poster art, this book includes guidance on composing a strong design, selecting colours to make sure your artwork pops, and adding lettering for a picture-perfect finished poster.

Learn to create key poster elements such as clouds, skies, water and architecture, and discover how to add your own stylized lettering. There are six striking international projects to complete, or you can use your newfound skills to celebrate your own home town or treasured place. This book is packed with examples of Susie West’s inspiring artwork and a short history of travel posters.

Since 2015, Susie West has been working her way around the UK recreating the upbeat, retro charm of travel posters in the modern world. This book shares her techniques and secrets for producing fun, charming artwork. Suitable for beginners, this is a great way into art for those who want to develop their skills, or for experienced artists wanting to try something new.

Introduction 6, Before you set out 12, Planning the trip: Designing your own travel poster 18, Getting started 36, Adding lettering 66

Projects 72

Amsterdam Canals 74
Sydney Opera House 80
London Tower Bridge 88
Mount Rainier National Park, USA 96
Lisbon Trams 104
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco 112

Onward travel 120, Afterword 124, Lettering templates 125, Index 128

About the Author

About Susie West

Susie West trained as a graphic designer. While stuck on a train, she passed the time doodling the little rows of houses through the misted-up windows. These little rows of houses got stuck in her head and she painted them. She began selling her paintings of these quirky made-up village scenes which eventually evolved into a full-time business of travelling around Britain’s real cities, towns and villages for a range of travel poster prints.

Today, Susie is kept busy in her home in Leatherhead, Surrey, UK. When not producing her lovely acrylic paintings of cities, towns and villages, she is exhibiting at craft fairs and shows, or selling her prints. To learn more about Susie's work visit her website www.artistsusiewest.com, or follow her continuing painting travels on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @artistsusiewest

Press

Leisure Painter

Posters have long been a way for artists to communicate with others, but the travel posters as we know them emerged in the early 20th century born out of the desire to travel and improvements in printing processes. Artist Sue West, has been working her way around the UK since 2015 recreating the retro charm of travel posters in the modern world. So far she has painted over 150 different places, from village greens to city architecture.

In her new book, Passport to Painting, she shows us how to create our own travel posters, looking at elements such as equipment and materials, how to paint skies and water, foliage, architecture, lettering and the impact colour can have on your work. Susie has also designed six of her own travel posters that she presents as step-by-step projects so that we can have a go ourselves. As she writes in her introduction: 'Once, like me, you start seeing the whole world as a travel poster, there'll be no stopping you!'

The Artist

If you like the idea of working with bold colours and geometric shapes to capture the essence of a place in an interpretation, rather than a slavish imitation of the classic travel poster, this delightful book will give you all you need. It is almost certainly unique I've never seen one before and I doubt I will again, so it needs to be a good and its pleasing to be able to report that it is both.

Susie provides plenty of advice, both basic and advanced - how to take photographs as well as use them, for instance, and how to hold brushes as well as distil detail and colour to create striking images.

Just leafing through the pages gives a sense of a job not only well, but completely done. This might be a niche book, but the results are intriguing and it's hard not to be encouraged to experiment.

Amazon Customer Review

This book is probably most useful for beginners in acrylic painting and contains much useful information and tips on what essential equipment to buy and good alternatives to expensive kit too. More experienced painters could usefully use the book to try out, what for most, would be a different style of painting. There are six step-by-step exercises to enable you to put into practice the suggestions given earlier in the book. I intend using some of the techniques (which are transferable) to working on a textile art quilt at some point in the future. The book is colourfully set out.

Amazon Customer Review

If you are new to painting or have not painted for a while, the exercises are easy to follow. If you enjoy doing poster art and love trying a new medium, great to do with your acrylic paint pens or posca pens.

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