Modern Watercolor: A playful and contemporary exploration of watercolor painting

Beautiful book, well written and laid out... Easy to follow instructions and the information for a beginner is bang on... was a gift for my daughter to get her into watercolors. Shes' very happy with it.

It’s very nice book for beginners who have started or interested in watercolours..

I have only recently gotten into watercolour painting and my biggest interest is in botanics - even just to look through this book to see how the author paints these flowers is lovely. There are step by step instructions along with images and these images show how the author holding her brush/making the stroke, which is incredibly helpful and I have found is lacking in other books that I have been using.There is also an introduction to watercolour painting, as most other books, and again, the images that show how to mix the paint and set up a palette is brilliant - as I was getting this wrong previously, and was wondering why my paintings were drying different to how I intended! Fantastic book, highly highly recommend!

An excellent resource for the beginner watercolourist.

As context for this review, I am an absolute beginner and not very creative. This is one of my favorite watercolor books so far, it has a ton of full color illustrations, almost the same amount of space as the text. It also isnt overly technical and features loose style painting. In addition to the standard review of supplies and tools (which is only 6 pages, just the right amount of depth given how ubiquitous this information is), the Getting Started section includes a 8 pages on technique. These cover the right amount of water and paint which I haven’t seen discussed in this basic way before, washes, lifting paint, blending, hard and soft edges and more. Then there is a 10 page section on color including the color wheel, color mixing charts and black and white painting. The 8 page Mark-Making and Brushstrokes section covers the various brushes and the types of marks they can make and includes 4 pages of watercolor lettering information. There are 6 pages on shapes and patterns and 12 pages on resist techniques. The painting botanicals section is my favorite with 32 pages on flowers, greenery, wreaths and all-over patterns. It has step by step instructions for a variety of flowers including roses, tulips and peonies. The painting animals, landscapes and more section is 24 pages and as the title describes covers animals and landscapes as well as faces and interior paintings. This is my least favorite section as the animals, faces and interiors seem like they require more talent than I have but they do seem basic, like someone with just a bit of talent could handle them. The 6 page landscape portion is more my speed, back to the suggestion of things rather than detailed images.