Given my current misery I treated myself to a couple of new books from my friends at Amazon. They were: The Painterly Approach: An Artist's Guide to Seeing, Painting and Expressing and Bold Strokes: Dynamic Brushwork in Oils and Acrylics: Dynamic Brushwork for Oils and Acrylics Read them c2c but haven't had time to digest everything yet. The second one is OK and has some nice ideas - the sections on how to load a brush really made me giggle - but the first one is a cracker...or it was for me. Now I know sweet FA about technique or approaches but I've never been a drawer / sketcher... I always work from shapes and colour rather than line and form. So instead of sketching something and colouring it in. I let stuff evolve from core blocks of colour. According to the first book this is exactly the 'painterly' approach... so I feel somewhat vindicated... maybe my approach has a degree of merit afterall. Also interesting to see the recommended brush choices he makes are the same as the ones I've evolved to over time. Anyway the first of these is pretty good I reckon and for a tenner... well. Cheers, Ade