Customer Reviews

Painting Flowers in Watercolor with Charles Reid

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I wish I had had this book years ago. It contains exercises to enable the reader/student to experience and learn direct painting techniques that bring freshness, spontaneity, bright vivid color and realism to one's paintings--inspite of an "untidy" style. If you're serious about watercolor, Reid can take you where you really should go. Reid embodies the principles of the best of watercolor and painting teaching of the past (particularly Hawthorne, Henri, Manet). He puts it all together into what I call a meditative painting style (stroke on color and pause to consider, then soften, add other color wet-in-wet, and so on. Doing the exercises in this book can revolutionize your painting and will, at the very least, bring immediate and important improvements to your technique and approach to watercolor. If you like Reid's paintings--flower, figures, portraits, etc., do yourself a favor--get the book and the two corresponding videos.

I discovered Charles Reid at my local library and was smitten with his loose, colorful, gorgeous pictures. This book is a clear, helpful guide to making juicy watercolors of still lifes that sing with color. He has practical tips on brushwork, contour drawing and composition that are easy to follow and clearly explained. He also has step-by-step instructions for several of his pictures that show you how he goes about making his own pictures (often from everyday objects and flowers on his kitchen counter). I'm fairly new to watercolors and I found this book invaluable to improving my pictures and getting me to loosen up and feel creative and find beauty in simple objects.

I have just purchased this book, as well as 2 instructional videos by Charles Reid. I would highly recommend the set to anyone who needs to "loosen up" his or her painting style. He shows you how to get the color right with a minimal amount of strokes, and how to keep from overworking a painting. He is an excellent instructor and author. You won't be disappointed!

Charles Reid has shared with the reader all the amazing sensitive

movements of his brush, the freshness of his colors, the lyrical line of his pencil.I have taken many workshops with him, and I feel that I am actually in a studio painting. Do as he says, step by step, and your watercolors will come alive. You will take a journey through a page-negative to positive,warm to cool,dark to light,lost and found edges. Less is more, one or two strokes tell an entire story.

Physically this is a typical how-to art book from North Light, Watson-Guptil, etc., here from North Light. It's about 11 by 9 inches and 144 pages. Index and table of contents included and plenty of good quality color reproductions.
But only physically is it a typical art how-to book. This not another art boiler like, "Painting Spring Grasses in Water-Soluble Oil Sticks". For one thing, the reproduced paintings are excellent, something rare in this genre. For another thing, albeit brilliantly successful, Reid is an eccentric watercolorist. He paints differently, often in contradiction to accepted practice, something he attributes (unconvincingly) to his formal training being only in oils. This difference is something to bear in mind if you want a book tutoring basic watercolor painting. Reid's version isn't the usual. Sure, he's a clean water, clean palette florals guy using bright fresh colors, but he's still very different painter.
A list of Reid's eccentricities is long. He doesn't ensure precise color placement control by working horizontally, rather he paints on a steeply tilted easel, resulting in many paint flow accidents. An aside; my sister took a workshop from him and gave me a report. All the attendees were of course previously aware of Reid's signature paint droops, dribbles, etc. When (inevitably) someone asked him what was the purpose of his accidental runs, Reid slowly turned and quietly leveled a look, "What accidental runs?" This chancy, incompletely controlled approach accords with his practice of mixing colors almost entirely on the paper. Reid accepts, no, positively counts on the fortuitous accidents afforded by partnering with the rather unpredictable, the pure paint, the clean water and the virgin paper. For example, to get that green, sort of, put cerulean blue down next to and partially overlapping with cadmium lemon and obtain, mostly, that green, but with pleasing variegation and clear echoes of the original pure blue and pure yellow. Typically a lovely result. To my taste, allowing the materials to operate in a risky almost unpredictable way is the very best of watercolor painting.
Also, contrary to the common canon, Reid doesn't layer several transparent glazes, overlaying each until the proper mid-tones and darks are achieved, analogous to the way Hollywood superimposed clear cartoon celluloids until Mickey emerged in the desired scene. Instead, much like Sargent learned and practiced, Reid says strike the final darks and mid-tones at the very start, before attending to the lightest, with the fewest further washes. Painting a premier coup. Of course, in watercolor the whites are conserved from the start as just the paper, and Reid is a master of incorporating white. Turn a Reid painting upside down and you will be astonished to see that it can seem almost entirely white paper.
Another unusual attribute of Reid's method is his relatively large palette or range of colors. In just a smallish tourist palette, mind you, he loads up to twenty colors, not the half dozen or less commonly recommended. Yes, a smaller palette does make color harmony more likely. And, most of us deplore the inept use of too many hues, resulting in a painting like a collision of a truck carrying tropical sherbets with a pizza delivery van. But, Reid carries it off, no doubt via judicious use of only a sizable fraction of his wide palette. It's evident that Reid likes paint and I like that in an artist.
Before leaving the subject of Reid's iconoclastic, challenge-those-laws approach, I must mention that it is really key to understanding his work. This book is stuffed with successful, mostly beautiful violations of the usual rules, far too many "infractions" to mention in a brief review. Keep an eye out for them and note how well they work. For example, why limit yourself to one focal point; Reid often has three or even four and to wonderful effect. These rebellions bring smiles to your face and more importantly, offer more energy and freedom to your own work. Reid's work seems to echo the "Question Authority!" bumper stickers of his youth.
In contrast to many, Reid's book makes a strong effort to provide much instruction and opportunity for exercise. Like most he begins with condensed advice on materials (paper, brushes, colors, etc.) and how to use them (wetting paper, holding a brush properly, mixing colors, and more). However, this book then progresses thru a long succession of increasingly challenging and beautifully illustrated step-by-step exercises, from a simple duck decoy to complicated floral still life. Tips and advice sub-sections and asides are sprinkled generously thru the text. Amusing, but profoundly true, among the many tidbits is, "...Never be bound by rules. No good painter follows rules..." Reid's teaching is a pastiche of many such apparent contradictions and this book is the more instructive and entertaining for it.
I recommend the book without reservation, unless you demand a book that will make you a watercolorist. In the real world you won't find that book; you can't learn to paint by sitting down with one book any more than you can learn the piano that way. I recall the aphorism, "It takes 100 paintings to make a watercolorist." Maybe it should be, one thousand. However, if you attentively read Reid's text, aggressively analyze the illustrations of his work and faithfully do all the hands-on exercises, then you surely will have made much good progress.

I first met Charles Reid and his wife Judy in 1988 and it was the beginning of an endless learning process ever since. I have learnt so much about watercolour from his books over the years since then. Charles' books are amazing in that he holds nothing back and just discloses all his knowledge in a wonderful style that is easy to learn from. Invariably there are step by step demonstrations to illustrate his methods. Even if the reader doesn't particularly like his style but would rather paint in a more classic sense with lots of glazes and so forth you will still learn so much about how the colours interact with water and on the paper. Charles' workshops are a great delight and if you are fortunate to attend one you will find that he is a friendly man of great warmth and charm which is reflected in his books.

This book is essentially a course that if you follow diligently will give you the experience of painting in a loose style with strong colours. If you enjoy painting in a neat and tidy manner the book will challenge your values. Whether you will continue to paint this way in the future is up to you but you will have had the experience. This style of painting is where you put down a quick brush stroke and mostly leave it alone. Reid is generous with his knowledge. You will learn about his ideas of composition which are definitely not middle of the road. He is a good teacher even though the book lacks a bit of detail in parts. However it does have plenty of individual exercises. It's a good book for an artist with intermediate experience looking for some new directions. The fact that it's about painting flowers is really incidental. It's certainly not for the botanical artist. I enjoyed the experience.

I admire Charles Reid greatly and aspire to his loose, vibrant style. I own several of his books and like them all, but this earlier volume seems to have the most specific instructions on how to achieve his unique effects. I highly recommend buying it first, if you can.

This is a good book which teaches step by step how to paint flowers and other still life objects. It starts off with easier projects and works up to more difficult ones. Each project lists what color of paints to use, along with pictures and instructions. Charles Reid also talks about what kinds of papers, paints, brushes, palettes and other materials you will need. Best of all his book is filled with beautiful full color pictures of his paintings. He is not a watercolor artist who uses many layers of transparent glazes, so if you are looking for that kind of instruction it is probably not for you. Highly recommend this book.

This book arrived in N.Z.in Excellent condition in 23 days from ordering through Amazon.Your purchasing site is very user friendly.
I have had this book out of the Library four times...as I find it such an excellent resource for painting myself... and also to help others to master watercolor.So now that I own it myself it will be in constant use.
It is full of excellent demonstrations, clearly illustrated and explained.
I love the way Reid uses watercolor and he shares his techniques so generously.These are clearly and well explained.
Every page is full of "painting magic" and is there for the taking.
Thanks Charles Reid and thanks Amazon.