Painting Flowers in Watercolor with Charles Reid

Physically this is a typical how-to art book from North Light, Watson-Guptil, etc., here from North Light. It's about 11 by 9 inches and 144 pages. Index and table of contents included and plenty of good quality color reproductions. But only physically is it a typical art how-to book. This not another art boiler like, "Painting Spring Grasses in Water-Soluble Oil Sticks". For one thing, the reproduced paintings are excellent, something rare in this genre. For another thing, albeit brilliantly successful, Reid is an eccentric watercolorist. He paints differently, often in contradiction to accepted practice, something he attributes (unconvincingly) to his formal training being only in oils. This difference is something to bear in mind if you want a book tutoring basic watercolor painting. Reid's version isn't the usual. Sure, he's a clean water, clean palette florals guy using bright fresh colors, but he's still very different painter. A list of Reid's eccentricities is long. He doesn't ensure precise color placement control by working horizontally, rather he paints on a steeply tilted easel, resulting in many paint flow accidents. An aside; my sister took a workshop from him and gave me a report. All the attendees were of course previously aware of Reid's signature paint droops, dribbles, etc. When (inevitably) someone asked him what was the purpose of his accidental runs, Reid slowly turned and quietly leveled a look, "What accidental runs?" This chancy, incompletely controlled approach accords with his practice of mixing colors almost entirely on the paper. Reid accepts, no, positively counts on the fortuitous accidents afforded by partnering with the rather unpredictable, the pure paint, the clean water and the virgin paper. For example, to get that green, sort of, put cerulean blue down next to and partially overlapping with cadmium lemon and obtain, mostly, that green, but with pleasing variegation and clear echoes of the original pure blue and pure yellow. Typically a lovely result. To my taste, allowing the materials to operate in a risky almost unpredictable way is the very best of watercolor painting. Also, contrary to the common canon, Reid doesn't layer several transparent glazes, overlaying each until the proper mid-tones and darks are achieved, analogous to the way Hollywood superimposed clear cartoon celluloids until Mickey emerged in the desired scene. Instead, much like Sargent learned and practiced, Reid says strike the final darks and mid-tones at the very start, before attending to the lightest, with the fewest further washes. Painting a premier coup. Of course, in watercolor the whites are conserved from the start as just the paper, and Reid is a master of incorporating white. Turn a Reid painting upside down and you will be astonished to see that it can seem almost entirely white paper. Another unusual attribute of Reid's method is his relatively large palette or range of colors. In just a smallish tourist palette, mind

I discovered Charles Reid at my local library and was smitten with his loose, colorful, gorgeous pictures. This book is a clear, helpful guide to making juicy watercolors of still lifes that sing with color. He has practical tips on brushwork, contour drawing and composition that are easy to follow and clearly explained. He also has step-by-step instructions for several of his pictures that show you how he goes about making his own pictures (often from everyday objects and flowers on his kitchen counter). I'm fairly new to watercolors and I found this book invaluable to improving my pictures and getting me to loosen up and feel creative and find beauty in simple objects.

I wish I had had this book years ago. It contains exercises to enable the reader/student to experience and learn direct painting techniques that bring freshness, spontaneity, bright vivid color and realism to one's paintings--inspite of an "untidy" style. If you're serious about watercolor, Reid can take you where you really should go. Reid embodies the principles of the best of watercolor and painting teaching of the past (particularly Hawthorne, Henri, Manet). He puts it all together into what I call a meditative painting style (stroke on color and pause to consider, then soften, add other color wet-in-wet, and so on. Doing the exercises in this book can revolutionize your painting and will, at the very least, bring immediate and important improvements to your technique and approach to watercolor. If you like Reid's paintings--flower, figures, portraits, etc., do yourself a favor--get the book and the two corresponding videos.

I have just purchased this book, as well as 2 instructional videos by Charles Reid. I would highly recommend the set to anyone who needs to "loosen up" his or her painting style. He shows you how to get the color right with a minimal amount of strokes, and how to keep from overworking a painting. He is an excellent instructor and author. You won't be disappointed!

Charles Reid has shared with the reader all the amazing sensitivemovements of his brush, the freshness of his colors, the lyrical line of his pencil.I have taken many workshops with him, and I feel that I am actually in a studio painting. Do as he says, step by step, and your watercolors will come alive. You will take a journey through a page-negative to positive,warm to cool,dark to light,lost and found edges. Less is more, one or two strokes tell an entire story.