WATERCOLOUR can have qualities of exceptional clarity, unadulterated purity, and a freshness that delights the eye. This book is about the "colour" part of watercolour - about understanding it; what it is and what it isn't; what colours in watercolour are capable of doing; and how you can best use colour to express yourself in your paintings with greater skill, knowledge and conviction.
Here's a sample of what's inside. In this demonstration, using a palette of nine colours, Hill shows you how to create light filled paintings. You'll learn how things surrounding the house (or the main object of your painting) affect the hues and values found on the house and in its shadow.
Step 1: Using flat brushes, wash in the sky with cobalt and manganese blue, cutting around the tree limbs. Next, paint the foreground and weeds working wet-in-wet. I "charged" the warm and cool greens with bits of raw and burnt sienna, manganese blue and permanent rose, plus a little salt for texture. When dry, brush off the salt and paint the hills and cast shadows on the driveway, using cobalt and manganese blue with a bit of permanent rose.
Step 2: Next, paint the windmill, chimney and corral areas. Then add the shadows on the house, trees, outbuildings, etc. Most of these were done using appropriate warms and cools mixed from raw sienna, scarlet lake, permanent rose, cobalt blue and manganese blue. Add more tree foliage and weed shadows, using mixed greens made darker with additions of burnt sienna and alizarin crimson.
Step 3: Again using a flat brush, add more tree limbs and twigs, plus warm darks to the windows, truck, windmill and foliage. These darks were made with different combinations of burnt sienna, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.
All that's left is the fine-tuning: details like the roof lines, clapboard lines, barbed wire, weed details, tree trunk lines and textures.
This colour grid gives you a chance to see each colour that you test both over and under every other colour. Paint all the colours in one direction and let dry. Then repeat them in the same order going across at right angles. Relative transparency or opacity, as well as glazing characteristics, are quickly revealed. (Backcover of book – 1993 hardback Studio Vista edition)
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The Watercolourist's Complete Guide to Colour
Colour always presents a special challenge for the watercolourist. In this complete guide, master watercolourist Tom Hill teaches you how to use colour to your best advantage. You'll learn how to achieve textural effects, mix colours and choose colour palettes (warm, cool, low-key, high-key, tonal, minimum), and how to create the effects of distance and atmosphere through colour.
You'll learn all of these skills through numerous examples and colour charts throughout the book illustrating ...
• wash and glazing techniques
• "charging" a wet colour into another wet colour
• analysis of 40 popular pigments including colour temperature, transparency or opacity, degree of stain, and other useful observations about each colour
• how several different primary colours can make a surprising array of colour - and showing how red, blue and yellow can each be either cool or warm
• how light affects colour, including a detailed explanation of how to paint reflected light
• the use of many different palettes
• plus much more to help you create the effects you want in your paintings.
In addition to the easy-to-use charts and examples, there is a wealth of simply beautiful paintings by Hill sprinkled throughout the book, showing all of the theories in practical applications. The last chapter is dedicated to 10 step-by-step demonstrations of:
• colour in shadows
• colour in a white subject
• colour in a colourful subject
• colour in water
• colour in clouds and sky
• painting the greens in nature
• intensifying a colour's brilliance
• painting greys that aren't muddy
• using colour to create distance
• redesigning your subject's colour
In this book, Tom Hill teaches you how to master the use of colour in your watercolour paintings with methods that are easily understood by beginners as well as intermediate and advanced painters. (Front flap of book – 1993 hardback Studio Vista edition)
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About the Author
Growing up in Southern California, Tom Hill attended the Art Center College of Design there, later continuing art studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has had a most varied art career : a Navy artist while in the service; a storyboard and set design artist at Universal Studios in Hollywood; an artist-reporter for the Chicago Tribune; and an illustrator and graphic designer freelancing in New York before moving to Arizona, where he now lives and pursues a full-time fine art career.
Travel and art workshop assignments have taken Tom to more than forty countries around the world. He is also the author of several best-selling books on watercolour painting, including Colour for the Watercolour Painter and The Watercolour Painter's Problem Book, as well as a number of articles in various art journals. He is an elected member of the American Watercolor Society, the National Academy of Design and the National Academy of Western Art. He also holds honorary membership in several other Western art societies. He has exhibited in many one-man and juried shows across the nation, including such places as the Academy of the Arts, Honolulu; the Los Angeles Artists' Association; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Academy Galleries in New York; the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. (Back flap of book – 1993 hardback Studio Vista edition)
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