Master Watercolor with the help of Joe Garcia's Watercolor Bible!
The Watercolor Bible is your complete and definitive book on watercolor techniques and principles, jam-packed with indispensable advice for nearly every aspect of working with the medium.

In essence, this book holds the equivalent of 20+ years of painting experience. In addition to classic rules of composition and color principles, Joe Garcia shares his personal favorite color combinations and breakthrough concepts that helped him along the way. Although this book is loaded with information, it's presented in a friendly, straightforward, heavily illustrated way so that it's not at all overwhelming.

The Watercolor Bible Is Jam-Packed with Indispensable Advice!
As useful to your painting success as water and color, The Watercolor Bible is a must-have addition to your toolkit. It's organized topically to be a quick and handy reference to the real-life challenges you encounter when you paint, from mixing color and softening edges to more complex information like how to paint animal fur, skin tones and foliage.

Materials and Supplies: In this chapter you'll find out what to look for in a palette. Synthetic or natural brushes' How to pick a good palette knife. The 1-2-3's of stretching paper. And more.

Collecting and Recording Ideas: From a few scribbled words or a quick sketch to field painting and building your own reference photo file, this chapter will help you preserve an idea that you might later paint.

A Quick and Easy Guide to Composition: Five easy composition formulas, guidelines for choosing format (horizontal, vertical, square), and other nuggets in this chapter help you achieve that balance between good form and personal instinct that makes a striking piece of art.

Drawing Techniques: This chapter is like a mini-drawing workshop. Learn how to see every object as an assemblage of basic shapes, capture movement with gesture drawings, hone your powers of observation with contour drawing, and more.

Paint Properties and Techniques: Wet-into-dry, flat wash, gradated washes, variegated washes, lifting color, scrubbing...in this chapter you'll find easy-to-follow directions for each, along with illustrations and insight on how they can affect the mood and direction of your painting.

Color: In this practical, tried-and-true color chapter you'll find answers to questions like: How does the temperature of color affect the painting' What's the trick to mixing luminous grays' How do I get all those interesting greens I see in foliage' And what's the trick to avoiding mud'!

Special Effects: Ready for some fun'! Here's a chapter full of special tricks for unique effects. Use paraffin and sandpaper to capture the illusion of fast flowing water. Add 'sparkle' by scraping with the tip of a utility knife. And more!

Popular Subjects: The final chapter is the best of all, worthy of a book in itself! It consists of a series of over 40 step-by-step projects--great practice for applying all that you've learned, and the perfect place to turn when you're feeling stuck for inspiration.

And You're Off!
The Watercolor Bible will get you off to a running start and keep you good company every stroke of the way--from the basics of stretching paper, creating your own value scale and transferring a drawing to the more advanced challenges of mingling edge qualities, fixing mistakes, and painting shadows, skin tones and skies. You'll find yourself referring to it constantly; a user-friendly, wire-o binding makes it easy to flip open during a painting sessions, and its handy 6x9 format makes it small enough to take anywhere.

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