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Ray’s Top Tips For Watercolour Artists
85 Essential Tips to Improve Your Painting

by Ray Campbell Smith

     

As the title indicates, this is a book of tips on how to paint better watercolor pictures. There are 85 different tips in here, and they range from choosing paints to laying down washes, working from photographs to getting to grips with perspective. This is the type of book that is suitable for both beginners and intermediate level painters, being a gold mine of information on not only what to do, but what not to do and why.

I like the way this book stays flat for easy reference, when placed near where you are painting—all practical books ought to have spiral spines! I also confess to being impressed with how few materials you really need to paint really good landscapes, especially the paints (only five!). This is very much a book for landscape watercolor artists, and as it is published in the UK, anybody not wanting to paint pictures of that country will need a rather different palette, and so a Mediterranean one is also given. I found particularly helpful the parts where one painting is shown with an error and another shown correcting it—the early part of this book contains many such examples and they are more helpful than just words, or just showing the ideal painting.

Most of the pictures shown convey mood, atmosphere and a sense of place wonderfully and are quite small, so I would love to see a beginner’s book of staged watercolor paintings as quick and simple. As it is, they illustrate admirably the various tips given, and despite this being a quick read, I found that it is the type of book that is handy to keep as a reference to dip into. The combination of simple pictures and the author’s laconic but perfectly understandable style makes for a user-friendly and successful format. Highly recommended for anybody who paints landscapes in watercolors—or wants to—and could use some tips.

The Book

Search Press
January 2010
Spiral Bound Hardback
184448453X / 9781844484539
How-To Books / Art
More at Amazon.com US || UK
Excerpt
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The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2010
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