Watercolor Basics - Let?s Get Started

I had assembled nearly a dozen books on watercolor painting instruction and techniques. I wish I had bought this book first. While the other books do contain useful instruction, the demonstrations--beautiful, inspiring--are often too difficult for the beginning painter. Not so with this book.

The book begins at the beginning, with no assuptions of a certain level of skill. The book then takes you through a series of exercises, based on certain basic skill such as a flat or gradated wash, proceeding to still more difficult techniques. Yet the exercises are sufficiently simple, with easy to reproduce sketches, that you end up with a small work of art: simple, but solidly founded in an essential technique and its mastery.

There are also sections which focus on monochromatic studies to help the student think about and approach the concept of values. The exercises in these sections enable the beginning painter to produce lovely, sophisticated-looking pictures with just a few newly mastered concepts and techniques. I have never before been so pleased with the results of my exercise paintings than those introduced in this book.

I think this book would be an excellent, even essential, item for the beginning painter looking for a solid foundation in this often capriciously difficult medium. I cannot recommend this book more highly. Thank you to Jack Reid for this marvelous book.