Watercolor Step-By-Step - Kolan Peterson
Watercolor Step-By-Step by Kolan Peterson is a large format, 10 1/4" by 13 1/2" softcover book that lays flat and is full color. It's also extremely short - only 32 pages.
The book is in essence a collection of painting ideas for someone who already knows how to watercolor. It has one brief page on colors and brushes, but then it leaps right into the paintings. Pretty much every remaining page in the book is a one-page overview of how to do a painting. You get a larger size version of the final image, and four to five small images showing the steps to get there. Each smaller step has a few brief notes about the colors or techniques used in that step.
So, for example, a desert panorama might start by telling you the colors used in the sky, along with a rough sketch of the scene. Image 2 would show the mountains being shaded in, and image 3 shows the rocks and foreground. Someone with experience in watercolors understands the techniques involved to shade the rocks and create the wash. Someone brand new to watercoloring will probably be baffled.
Kolan uses primarily the same blue-green-brown set of colors throughout the images, and most of them are landscapes or images with rustic buildings. So you'd want to be interested in this type of a theme to get the most from this book.
The images are certainly lovely, from a tropical island to a quiet cabin. So if one of these calls to you, and the brief notes are enough to get you going, this could be just right.
For someone brand new to watercoloring, you should probably hold off on this until you get those basics under your belt.
I took this book out from the library to read. For me, none of these images really "called to me" so I returned it without renewing it. If I get a book that does interest me I often renew it to practice and repractice with it before relinquishing it.
Watercolor Tips and How To - Main Page
Art History Page