Book Review: Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color

Update 2016: The book may be out of print, but an ebook version has been made available for sale.

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color

This is a beautiful and useful book dedicated to understanding colours as used in watercolour.

It's split into three parts. Section 1 is on understanding pigment properties. Section 2 touches on the colour palettes and schemes. The last section looks at how you can use colours on different subject matters that range from landscapes to portrait drawings.

The text is informative and written in a way that's easy to understand. The pages are nicely laid out with beautiful examples from the author Jan Hart as well as other watercolour artists. You can get to check out different styles and the versatility of watercolour.

I like that the examples show the many possibilities of using colours, especially on putting colours on subjects that you don't normally associate them with. There are a couple of cool demonstrations on how different colour schemes can produce different moods even with the same subject.

There are many tutorials and little exercises scattered around, with lots of tips, ideas and techniques on the different ways you can experiment on your own.

This is an interesting and inspirational book. Even if you're not into watercolour, you might have second thoughts after reading this.

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Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP)

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 01

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 02

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 03

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 04

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 05

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 06

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 07

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 08

Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color - 09

Availability

Update 2016: This book is out of print. However, there's an ebook that Jan Hart has made available that you can buy at https://janhart.com/

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Comments

the pages and mixing swatches do remind me a lot of steven quillers "color choices". its a book on color harmonies for paintings and uses pigment names for illustration mostly instead of points on a color wheel.

i found its proposals on how to build different types of palettes quite useful - its useful for providing a starting point that always works, in terms of color palettes. (actually, rules on how to make a starting point, not premade starting points)

Thanks so much for mentioning my book, 'The Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color' and that I have a pdf eBook available through my website, janhart.com. I do see the book available through resellers on amazon.com at a fairly reasonable price (i.e. under $60) from time to time. Though I know the eBook is nothing like having the real one, it has all the info and photos and paintings. Thanks so much! Jan Hart