Synopses & Reviews
In this bold, breakthrough approach to watercolor, renowned artist Nita Engle shows readers how to combine spontaneity and control to produce lively, luminescent paintings of realistic subjects. According to Engle, when it comes to working in watercolor, "there is no greater freedom than play." To that end, she begins the book with action-filled warm-up exercises that show us how to play with paint freely, in an unstructured way without rules or drawings until we become totally comfortable exploring the medium.
But freedom also entails planning, and subsequent step-by-step projects demonstrate how to transform loose, transparent washes into light-filled watercolors with textural effects achieved by literally throwing, squirting, pouring, spraying, and stamping color and water onto paper, and manipulating it all to gain effects that lead the artist to discover and delineate a recognizeable subject. In short, this enormously popular teacher shows how to combine the looseness of pure abstraction with the focused realism of landscape painting.
Filled with Nita Engle's gorgeous paintings and insightful instruction in her sometimes radical techniques, How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself will inspire artists to explore the medium as audaciously as Engle does herself.