Rating: 
Summary: A must for landscape painters
Review: This book is full of practical advice from one of the best landscape painters to my opinion. Interested readers will find all sort of ideas on composition, colors, techniques etc. I keep on reading it and I always find something new to study and to give some more toughts. Carlson has helped me improve my work. Just have a look at Carlson's work and and you will see how bright and sparkling are his paintings and how full of lessons they are. His book is the same; it is full of generous tips and lessons and without any complicated theories.
Rating:
Summary: A must for landscape painters
Review: This book is full of practical advice from one of the best landscape painters to my opinion. Interested readers will find all sort of ideas on composition, colors, techniques etc. I keep on reading it and I always find something new to study and to give some more toughts. Carlson has helped me improve my work. Just have a look at Carlson's work and and you will see how bright and sparkling are his paintings and how full of lessons they are. His book is the same; it is full of generous tips and lessons and without any complicated theories.
Rating: 
Summary: A Waste of money
Review: This book is terrible. It doesn't have much text in it, but what there is is awful. This book is filled mostly with emotional and philosophical ramblings instead of useful and practical information that teaches you to paint landscapes. The author says painting must be learned by practice and can't be taught. Then why did he write a book? Carlson's own paintings and drawings are of poor quality. They are crude and sloppy. I don't think such a poor artist is worth learning from. I wouldn't want to paint as poorly as he did. This is a stupidly written, uninformative book, a waste of money. There must be MUCH better books than this one about landscape painting. I was terribly misled by the other reviews of this book!
Rating:
Summary: Classic must have for landscape painters
Review: This is an essential how to guide for landscape painters. Carlson addresses the real nuts and bolts of how to paint a landscape and effectively deconstructs all aspects of the painted landscape into digestible principles and points. It has many B&W illustrations and examples of Carlson's work. In this day and age, however, it suffers from a complete lack of color pictures. It has been in print for decades and would get five stars and more if the publisher would find a landscape painter to add color reproductions of current painters who incorporate Carlson's principles, into the book. Or a companion book showing how other artists paint, using Carlson's points. There are many contemporary plein air painters, for example, who cite Carlson's tome in their list of recommended books. Any of them would add a great deal to this book and bring it into the mainstream of technique books that painters clamor for.But for pure technique, it can't be beat. Richard Schmid's book, Alla Prima, is also highly recommended, with more personal philosophy and some fantastic color reproductions of Schmid's works. Carlson's Guide is, however, noticeably cheaper and too inexpensive not to have on your studio bookshelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting
Review: This most excellent book taught me so very much about painting landscapes! I have been primarily a portrait painter and this book was so awesome to lead me to another subject. I highly recommend this book! The illustrations of work in this book are outstanding!
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