Expressing Land, Sea and Sky in Watercolor

There is one thing that all great landscape paintings have in common: atmosphere. Some paintings convey a somber mood through deep, dark colors and heavy shapes. Others manage to capture a fleeting moment on a bright summer day.

How often have you wished you could instill stronger atmosphere in your paintings to evoke a strong emotional response? In this book Rowland Hilder shows you how. He has painted the land, sea, and sky for more than fifty years. Through practice and perseverance he has become a master at understanding the fickle character of watercolor and is able to make it convey mood and atmosphere at will.

Hilder shows the value of careful planning before the brush touches the paper. He demonstrates the importance of having a clear idea of the theme of a painting, of deciding which features are essential to show this, and which are less necessary.

The tone, color, size, and temperature of the sky govern the light in a painting. To help you develop atmosphere in your paintings, Rowland Hilder has a section of sky exercises in which he shows how to handle aerial perspective, establish tonal extremes against a mid-value background, add color to tone, sponge out skies, paint dark clouds in a light sky, paint soft white clouds against a blue sky, paint warm clouds on a cold sky, create highlights and accents, lay in preparatory washes for a complicated sky, and paint a heavy graduated sky.

These exercises show precisely how you can create a strong mood through careful observation and handling of light.