Artist’s Complete Problem Solver

Landscapes • Flowers • Animals

What this book really is

Artist’s Complete Problem Solver: Landscapes • Flowers • Animals is a practical teaching book built around one very useful idea: most art problems become easier to fix when you can clearly identify what has gone wrong. Trudy Friend does not structure the book as a series of grand finished masterpieces for the reader to admire. Instead, she works through a sequence of materials, exercises, mistakes, and corrections. That gives the book a very direct teaching personality. It feels less like a showcase and more like a studio tutor standing beside you and saying, “Here is the mistake, and here is how to see it differently.”

The copyright page also shows that this is a compilation of three earlier books on landscapes, flowers, and animals. That matters because it explains the structure. The book has a shared introduction and techniques section, then three subject-based modules. As a result, the reader gets both general training and more focused application.

The book’s larger teaching philosophy

The introduction makes the teaching philosophy very clear. Friend says the book combines drawing and painting of landscapes, animals, and flowers, with emphasis on pencil, pen, and brush exercises that help readers understand technique. She also says that texture, tone, colour mixing, observational skill, negative shapes, and selective guidelines are key concerns. This is important because it shows that the book’s real subject is not just how to draw flowers or how to paint animals. Its deeper subject is how to observe and organize visual information.

That is one reason the book seems so useful for learners. Friend is not encouraging the reader to copy surface appearance blindly. She wants them to notice structure, tonal contrast, relationships between forms, and the shapes between objects. Again and again, the book pushes the reader toward seeing more intelligently.

The structure and why it works

The contents page shows a simple and strong architecture. After the opening Introduction & Techniques, the book moves through Landscapes, Flowers, and Animals, each broken into practical subtopics. Landscapes covers skies and clouds, water, mountains and hills, rural and urban landscapes, and trees and woodland. Flowers covers depiction of detail, accuracy, monochrome and colour co-ordination, colour, and composition. Animals then moves through introduction and techniques, domestic pets, farm animals, and wild animals.

This arrangement works well because it starts with foundations and then shows how those foundations behave differently in different subjects. A tonal problem in a sky is not the same as a tonal problem in white flower petals or black fur, but the underlying skill is related. The book seems to know that and keeps building cross-connections between subject areas.

Early strength: materials and mark-making

The early materials section is stronger than it might first appear. Friend does not just list supplies. She explains what different pencils, sticks, paints, papers, and pens are good for. Graphite pencils range from B to 9B. Watersoluble pencils are useful for sketching and mixed media. Charcoal pencils offer tonal range but smudge easily. Watercolour pencils can be used dry or activated with water. Pastel pencils work well on tinted surfaces and alongside pastel sticks. Pen choices are discussed in terms of nib variety and line effect. Even paper is handled thoughtfully, with differences between drawing paper, HP watercolour paper, Bockingford, and Saunders Waterford described in practical terms.

This matters because beginners often think technique begins only when they start drawing the actual subject. Friend shows that technique starts earlier, with understanding tools and surfaces. The materials section therefore functions as the first correction to beginner frustration. Sometimes the problem is not talent at all. Sometimes it is using the wrong surface or not understanding what a medium can do.

The mark-making pages continue this practical logic. Instead of abstract theory, Friend demonstrates how graphite pencils, coloured pencils, graphite sticks, charcoal, pastel, and pen produce different effects. She immediately ties these marks to possible uses like reeds, grasses, bark, foliage, and tonal masses. This is smart because it teaches technique in context.

What the book emphasizes most: negative shapes and tone

One of the strongest recurring themes in the book is negative shapes. The introduction already highlights them, and later sections keep returning to them. In the flower chapter, for example, the daisy spread says beginners often become confused because they outline every leaf or fail to notice the negative shapes in background areas. The solution page then explains that not every leaf should be described individually. Instead, broad tonal handling and negative shadow shapes help the white daisies stand out.

This is a very strong teaching move because it directs the reader away from fussing and toward structural seeing. The book repeatedly suggests that clarity comes not from drawing more outlines, but from understanding the relationship between light and dark, object and background, positive and negative shape.

Tone is the other major foundation. The book explicitly says many people paint in colour without understanding tonal values, and that monochrome work helps build awareness of tone in both monochrome and colour. The white-flower pages are a perfect example: instead of outlining petals with wire-like lines, the solution uses tonal variety in the foliage to let the petals emerge by contrast.

The landscapes section

The landscape section seems to use Friend’s method very well because landscape subjects easily expose compositional weakness. In the introduction she says landscape spreads on composition, editing in and editing out, and correcting mistakes are meant to give confidence. The index confirms the practical emphasis on perspective, outdoor working, skies, trees, buildings, and mistakes.

What seems especially valuable is that landscapes are not treated only as scenery. They become training grounds for understanding movement, focal points, distance, and simplification. Even in the opening mark-making and watercolour exercises, landscape-like effects such as tree trunks, foliage, reeds, reflections, and woodland are used as examples.

The flowers section

The flowers section may be the most revealing part of the book because flowers tempt beginners into decorative over-detail. Friend keeps resisting that temptation. On the “Daisies” problem page, she shows how careless outlines, random white gaps, and indiscriminate tones flatten the subject. On the solution page, she explains that the goal is not to describe every background leaf but to build an impression of foliage using tone, loose strokes, and important small dark negatives.

The monochrome and colour co-ordinated pages show another strength. Friend demonstrates how monochrome is not the opposite of colour learning but a support for it. The “Sweet Peas” example explains that clarity is lost when colour and tone are ignored, while the solution page shows how colour and monochrome thinking can coexist in one study.

The “Colourful Basket” and “Hanging Basket” pages are also excellent examples of the book’s practical intelligence. The problem page identifies perspective errors, unrelated white spaces, weak chain structure, and blob-like flower treatment. The solution page then restores structure, tone, eye-level logic, and coordinated colour. The following demonstration breaks the subject into tonal sketches, exploratory drawings, and first washes. That sequence shows how the book works best: it moves the reader from confusion to structure to expressive execution.

The animals section

The animals section broadens the same principles into a more structural subject. The introduction explains that angles matter because there is a skeleton beneath even the softest form, and later pages repeatedly emphasize observation, composition, and texture. The “With an Artist’s Eye” page is especially valuable because it encourages sketchbook use, observation from life, acceptance of distortion in reference, and the idea that apparent drawing disasters are part of learning rather than failure.

Texture is clearly a major focus. The “Hair and wool” pages are particularly strong because they compare two very different surfaces and show how line suits one while tonal shape suits the other. The mixed-media follow-up adds another layer, showing how watercolour underlay, contour, crosshatching, and stippling can deepen animal texture.

The final wild-animal example of penguins is also revealing. Instead of encouraging detailed realism alone, the solution page simplifies the forms into elegant curved black-and-white design shapes, while still insisting on composition, negative space, and enough environmental suggestion to anchor the birds. That shows the book at its best near the end: representational, but aware that simplification and design are part of strong depiction.

Writing style and tone

The tone of the book is encouraging, practical, and clear. Friend does not write in a precious or intimidating way. She often tells the reader to experiment, compare media, accept problems, and enjoy solving them. The “Artist’s Eye” page is especially generous in spirit because it explicitly tells readers not to fear sketchbook failure and not to treat rough work as disaster.

This tone matters because a problem-solving art book can easily become corrective in a discouraging way. Friend avoids that by keeping the emphasis on observation, practice, and progressive improvement. The book feels like it wants the reader to gain confidence, not just competence.

Strengths

The biggest strength is the problem-and-solution structure, which teaches diagnosis as well as technique.
A second strength is the repeated stress on negative shapes, tonal values, and observational intelligence, which gives the book more depth than a simple “copy this picture” manual.
A third strength is breadth with continuity. Landscapes, flowers, and animals are treated as different subjects, but the same artistic principles keep reappearing in new forms.

Weaknesses

The main limitation is that the book stays firmly inside traditional representational art. Readers looking for contemporary experimentation, abstraction, or digital work will not find much here.
A second limitation is that the breadth of the book means it cannot go deeply into any one medium or subject at the level of a specialist monograph. But that is also part of its usefulness as a broad training guide.

Final judgment

My judgment is clearly positive. Artist’s Complete Problem Solver looks like a very effective practical art manual because it teaches readers how to notice visual problems and then solve them through tone, shape, colour, texture, and composition. Its strongest lesson is that improvement in drawing and painting begins with improved observation, and the whole book is built to train exactly that.

Command Palette