Practical Watercolor Painting: The Comprehensive Guide to Materials and Techniques

This is a personal course designed by professionals, with practical demonstrations of ten watercolor projects. Through clear instructions and more than 200 full-color illustrations and photographs, you'll learn about the materials and techniques best suited to watercolor, including how to paint with sable brushes, how to create layered washes, and how to compose a landscape painting. You'll also learn how to develop individual solutions to questions of color, composition, , perspective, tone, and other challenges that every artist faces. Artists can learn a great deal from one another, so the author invited three artists with highly individual styles to execute the same ten projects for this book. The author's analysis of the problems specific to each project, and his critique of each finished project, will give you insight and inspiration. This is a unique and practical guide to developing your own style of watercolor painting.

I think that this would be an excellent starting place for anyone who is wanting to try watercolors as a hobby. Gerald Woods has provided a good overview of techniques, material, information and examples for composition, and the text is very clear and easy to follow. The exercises in the last part of the book are very helpful. In these exercises, three artists each does a watercolor from a photo - the reader is then able to observe step-by-step the approach that each artist uses in doing their painting and then the author provides a critique of each artist's finished product. This allows the reader to see that watercolors can be done in so many different styles and there is not necessarilly only one correct way to do a painting, as these examples will clearly illustrate. Although I have not mastered all of the tecniques illustrated in this book, it is great to see how they are used even if I am not yet using them in my paintings. I have become somewhat successful in selling my paintings and I am now having prints made of my better stuff. If I were to only have one reference book on hand this would be that book.