Customer Reviews

The Watercolorist's Complete Guide to Color

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4 star:		(1)
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Hill's painting style is loose, and ideal for the usually spontaneous nature of watercolor. This is a fine and needed book on color. The technique of painting receives a concise two chapters, yielding space to the problem of making watercolor paints behave. Hill's study of color is based in physics and reality, not taste. I much prefer it this way. Full and detailed descriptions of "all the paints you will probably ever use" tell how they perform, how to test your paints, and what to expect when you mix them. If blue and yellow do not make green for you, but brown or gray, this book gives insight into why this happens. To show what effect color selections have in a painting, one scene is painted with seven palettes, from minimal (monochromatic) to full colors. Chapter Seven, "Color in light & shadow", shows photographically how light and shadow effect color and how to duplicate the effects. I have not seen this covered in other books. Through ten demonstrations you will learn how to render colors in shadows, in colorful subjects, and in not-so-colorful subjects by making colorful grays. You will learn to use color to paint "white" subjects, the greens in nature, clouds and skies, and even colors that are not in a scene, but should be. This is a valuable an informative book. I have given away some twenty or so books to my artist club library, but not this one. It is worth the price, to me, for Chapter 7 alone. I would have rated it a 10, if it were on color only, minus the first two chapters, but these are helpful to beginners.

An excellent volume and companion to use in conjunction with Jeanne Dobie's book Making Colors Sing. While Dobie's book is outdated with all the advances in watercolor pigments and newer more permanent lightfast color, Hill's book not only picks up with the use of newer pigments, but his suggestions are excellent. This book is a wonderful addition to any library. I kept it nearby as I do Dobie's book. A must have book with excellent demonstrations and illustrations. Also the artist's style and work is wonderful too. A must have for anyone serious about watercolor, beginner or advanced.

This book gives an excellent idea and keeps an idol in front of the reader as how a watercolor painting should be. Nice simple language and examples chosen are truly magnificent. Tom's style of painting is simply out of the world.

This book is still a classic from one of the century's most respected watercolorists. Tom Hill is widely recognized as one of the great painting teachers and has influenced many of todays artists, including me. What I like about this book are Tom's examples of fresh color combinations, and use of color in shadow areas.

Great book, very imformative...at first when I flipped through the book it seem as though it would be a bit over my head, but when I actually sat down and went through it step by step and followed the colour guides it is definately one of the most helpful books for a beginner.
Practise the six different colour palette's and you immediately begin to understand more about colour, complimentary, analogous, high key, low key...Highly recommended

THIS IS A FABULOUS BOOK FOR ANYONE THAT IS INTO WATER PAINTING. TOM HILL IS GREAT.