Watercolor Animals: Tips, techniques, and step-by-step lessons for learning to paint whimsical artwork in vibrant watercolor (Colorways)

by Shaunna Russell

Discover how to create vibrant, colorful watercolor paintings of a wide range of animals.

With Colorways: Watercolor Animals, learn to paint all your favorite animals, from an elephant and a whale to a dog, cat, fish, and more. Each step-by-step demonstration shows not only how to capture the animal’s likeness, but also how to use color to create magical, otherworldly, and whimsical paintings.

In these tutorials, you will also learn how to use watercolor paint to suggest texture and fur on your animal subjects. Along the way, you will find technique instruction and tips for using different types of strokes, working with various brush shapes and sizes and using washes and underpaintings. Geared toward advanced beginners and more experienced watercolorists looking to play with color, this book offers fun subject matter and eye candy for all art lovers.

The Colorways series teaches artists how to employ color across a variety of media in unique and imaginary ways to create innovative and inspired artwork. Focusing less on realistic artistic representations and more on creating expressive art, this series invites you to break the standard rules of color and let your imagination and artwork soar to new heights in order to create unconventional, whimsical, and fanciful works of art.

Learn the customary rules of color, and then bypass them, with the help of Colorways: Watercolor Animals, a book that encourages you to use color for personal expression while painting your favorite animals.

• ISBN13: 9781633228085
• Publish Date: 3 December 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Walter Foster Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 128
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Watercolor Animals is a technique and tutorial guide in the "Colorways" series - this volume is by Shaunna Russell. Released 3rd Dec 2019 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 128 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.
Most readers are familiar with the Walter Foster technique paperbacks and this one follows the same format. The introduction (ca. 20% of the content) includes an overview of tools and supplies, some watercolor technique (wet into wet, masking, wet on dry, adding white), a short but info-dense chapter on color theory and mixing a palette, and getting started painting. The intro chapters are followed by 12 step by step tutorials. All of them are very colorful and appealing. The use of color is richly vibrant and different (see cover). The tutorials are explained clearly and the accompanying photographs (in color) are easy to follow. Each of the tutorials covers 6 - 8 pages of text and photos. The specific tools and palettes are not inluded but the tutorial photos are clear enough that readers won't have any trouble getting a similar result.

I really liked the explanations for preparing and using a reference photo for inspiration. She includes a very short capsule summary of gridding and sketching as well. Each of the tutorials includes one or more extra technique building points in addition to the artwork itself. Readers will find that working through the book will provide a fair number of technical skill building exercises to add to their repertoires.

This is not, strictly speaking, a book for beginning watercolorists; there's not a lot of hand-holding (palette choices, specific brush choices). There are several tutorials suitable for beginners however, and working through them, I would think that most readers will be able to do a credible job completing the rest without a lot of problems.

Five stars. I really liked both the style and execution.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.