Book Review: Watercolour Challenge: Techniques in Practice

This book seems to be one of the book published to accompany the Channel 4 series Watercolour Challenge created by Planet 24. That was in 1998. I guess the show was interesting because the content in this book is great.

Below's the list of books from the series, some of which are hard to find.

Watercolor Challenge (Amazon: US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP)
Watercolour Challenge: Techniques in Practice (Amazon: US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP)
Painting with Watercolour Challenge (Amazon: US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP)
Watercolour Challenge: Practical Painting Course (Amazon: US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP

Looking at the titles, it's difficult to tell if there's any overlap in content. You've to check out other reviews from Amazon.

For Watercolour Challenge: Techniques in Practice, it is split into three chapters: the techniques, mixing colours and projects. 224 pages in total.

Chapter 1 explores the techniques you can use to tackle different painting subjects, such as elements from the landscape, from the water to the sky. These are one-page lessons that give a step-by-step look and explanation at how to paint. There are hands on practices and demos. The lessons though short are insightful and easy to follow along.

Chapter 2 looks at colour mixing with a limited palette of 12 colours. The palette is based on a warm and cool version of each primary: red, yellow and blue. Each of the 12 colours are mixed in a 80 to 20 ratio and the results are presented on a page for quick referencing. There are also 50-50 mixes but only with colours beside them on the colour wheel. Besides explanation of the pigments, there are also some cool photos of the grounded powder pigments.

Chapter 3 has 22 step-by-step guided projects for additional hands-on practice. Each project is filled with satisfying large pictures of the steps, together with clear instructions. Some projects come with a helpful starting template which you need to redraw onto a bigger surface.

Lots of beautiful watercolour examples are used throughout. It's not just a practical book but also very inspiring.

Recommended to beginner to intermediate watercolour artists.

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