Ray's Top Tips for Watercolour Artists: 85 Essential Tips to Improve Your Painting

Jan 2010

The main focus of Ray's Top Tips is to help painters improve their painting. The book is ideal for for beginners and will help to give someone new to watercolour painting an insight into pitfalls to avoid in their painting. More experienced watercolour artists will also find plenty of interesting information in the book, in particular the illustrations help to act as a reminder of some more basic techniques.

Jan 10

A super book, really useful for anyone beginning in watercolour. Ray exhorts the artist to use only artist quality paints and paper, an excellent tip and I'm sure that use of inferior materials is the main reason so many people find watercolours difficult to work with. Ray makes suggestions as to what colours to purchase and that's very helpful, along with his advice on brushes and paper. Having purchased materials - what next? Ray covers use of sketchbooks and photographs, along with a simple viewfinder in order to select a painting subject and shows in a couple of simple paintings how moving position of trees or clouds help form a balanced and pleasing painting. He covers composition, tone, light and shade by way of simple easy to follow explanations accompanied by simple sketches showing what he means. This makes it effortless to understand and gives the artist confidence in what they are doing. This book has sections on shadows, colours and colour mixing, washes and dry brush work - all subjects to master and with Rays simple tips its easy to feel that you too can achieve pleasing paintings. The latter part of the book is devoted to simple tips on how to avoid mistakes like cauliflower runs, not mixing too many colours, painting skies and backgrounds, and adding subjects like tres and buildings into your work, and making them realistic and part of the scenery. An excellent book full of useful advice for all artists wanting to master watercolours.

Feb 10

As the title indicates, this is a book of tips on how to paint better watercolor pictures. There are 85 different tips in here and they range from choosing paints to laying down washes, working from photographs to getting to grips with perspective. This is the type of book that is suitable for both beginners and intermediate level painters, being a goldmine of information on not only what to do, but what not to do and why. I like the way this book stays flat when placed near where you are painting for easy reference - all practical books ought to have spiral spines! I also confess to being impressed with how few materials you actually really need to paint really good landscapes, especially the paints (only five!). This is very much a book for landscape watercolor artists, and as it is published in the UK anybody not wanting to paint pictures of that country will need a rather different palette although a Mediterranean one is also given. I particularly found helpful the parts where one painting is shown with the error and another shown correcting it - the early part of this book contains many such examples and they are more helpful than either just words, or just showing the ideal painting. Most of the pictures shown convey mood, atmosphere and a sense of place wonderfully and are quite small, so I would love to see a beginner's book of staged watercolor paintings as quick and simple. As it is they illustrate admirably the various tips given, and despite this being a quick read I found that it is the type of book that is handy to keep as a reference to dip into. The combination of simple pictures and the author's laconic but perfectly understandable style makes for a user friendly and successful format. Highly recommended for anybody who paints landscapes in watercolors - or wants to - and could use some tips.

Jan 10

Ray Campbell Smith is an experienced and respected teacher as well as being one of the best watercolour technicians there is. This is a slowly-developing series from Search Press that they're so far resisting the temptation to stuff with every Tom, Dick and Harry who'll put brush and pen to paper. It's been a while since the first volume appeared and this second one is certainly worth the wait - when Ray offers you 85 pearls of wisdom, you'd certainly better sit up and take notice! And he doesn't disappoint. Reading the contents list, you could be forgiven for thinking that the usual suspects (composition, use of colour, perspective. skies, foregrounds, etc, etc) are all here, and so they are, but seen from the unique perspective of a man who paints the best water and the best skies in the business, bar none. Ray can do more in a simple sketch than many artists can in a multi-page demonstration and this pocket-size guide is far larger in scope than its format. Ray will show you how to use colour and shading to give objects shape and to suggest perspective as well as to balance composition. The truth is that there's a veritable masterclass in here positively elbowing its way out.

Ray Campbell Smith is a prolific and versatile professional painter who specialises in the watercolour medium. More than forty one-man shows have been held, many in the wide-ranging list of galleries which regularly exhibit his work. His work is represented in many collections in the UK and abroad.
As well as contributing regularly to leading art magazines, he gives lectures, demonstrations and criticisms to art groups. He has made many highly successful instructional videos and DVDs and has written numerous books on painting, including several major best-sellers.
Ray is on the advisory panel of the Society of All Artists in the UK. He has appeared on TV on several occasions, once painting a landscape in the company of Mary Nightingale, and he was recently voted Artist of the Year by the Society of All Artists.