Catherine Gill - Powerful Watercolor Landscapes: Tools for Painting with Impact

When people first learn to paint landscapes, they naturally focus on technique: How do I get a tree to look like a tree or a rock to look like a rock? How do I get the mountain to sit back in the distance or the lake to lie flat? How do I get the water the right color?

Then, one day, it is suddenly not enough. You look at your paintings, and even the most beautiful ones don't satisfy you. You want more. More beauty. More meaning. More something. You may not even be sure just what you want. Almost without realizing it, you have set your feet on a new path. You want people to stop and stare at your paintings. Maybe even say, Wow. You want more power.

I wrote this book with Beth Means to share some of the tools that help my students at this stage of their painting. I call them power tools because each one will add more impact to your paintings. Some are general design tools, such as ways to create more interesting shapes. Others are tools especially helpful to landscape painters, such as how to mix satisfying greens to help you confidently tackle a wall of green grass, green trees, green water, green, green, green, green everywhere. The tools aren't necessarily difficult. It's more a matter of finding the right tool for the job you need to do.

Think of this book as a little backpack you can take with you that has a trail guide, a camp stove, some Band-Aids, warm gloves, blue paper towels and other handy aides to keep you on the trail to more powerful paintings.

The chapters are organized in the order you work on a painting, starting with the decisions you need to make before you pick up a brush, then on to organizing a solid composition through a value sketch. This is especially helpful because, even though the landscape before you is three-dimensional, you must paint it on a flat piece of paper. If you work out a strong composition in flat shapes first, not only is adding the third dimension as you paint much easier, but the final painting will also have good, strong bones underneath it. The last chapter covers tools to help you create strong color and replace washed-out or muddy colors with exciting transparents, vigorous middle values and delicious darks.