The Artist's Guide To Painting Water In Watercolour: 30 Techniques, Ron Hazell - Book Review

This one had been on my list for a while and was starting to look difficult to find on Amazon, so I had a hunt around and found a website that was still selling brand new versions and ordered it while I still could.  It's a 144 page paperback.

Just looking at the contents page should be enough to tell you that this is a really thorough book.  There are chapters on calm water, rippled water, rough water, breaking waves, the open sea, rivers/waterfalls, fog/rain/puddles and snow/ice.  There's reference to 30 techniques in the title of the book.  There was no master list of techniques for me to count but 30 must be an understatement.

Within each chapter, Ron starts off with some science about the shape of the water surface and why it makes different bits lighter or darker, what colours they are and what colour and shapes the reflections are.  He even illustrates this with photos.  At times it reminded me of Zoltan Szabo's chapter in the rules of reflection but this goes into much greater detail.  This is all good.  Science works for me.

And then Ron illustrates this all with some quick exercises and then some long demos.  I must admit I was worried about the demos.  Was I buying another Terry Harrison book for beginners?  Well, the demos were very much "do this, do that" rather than "this is what I did" but that was as far as the resemblance to Terry ended.  Because the big emphasis within the demos was on why Ron did what he did and how it illustrated the science preceding it.  This felt as natural and non-condescending as the worked examples in a physics textbook.

All this would be great but there's even more.  Throughout the book there are lots of other tips that have nothing to do with painting water that are still useful.  Information on colours and the pros and cons of transparent  colours, staining colours, granulating colours.  How to paint rocks.  The idea of signing a painting early with masking fluid if the bottom corners are going to be too dark to sign afterwards.  Perspective.  Underpaintings.  Composition.  Using warmer colours on the side of the painting where the light is coming from.  There's loads more that I could list.  He's put heart and soul into this and not held anything back for a second book.

So, how to paint water, lots of extra tips too.  Surely that's enough.  No.  There's more.  There's the inspiration I get from looking at his paintings.  I do like the look of his background tree lines.  An impressionistic soft-edged mix of blue, yellow and red, with the yellow or red often being earthy.  And then harder edged tree shapes in front of them.  It looks really good.

I also liked that Prussian blue was one of Ron's favourite colours, even if he's careful to warn about its staining ability and to warn us not to use it if we're wanting to lift it off.  Prussian blue doesn't appear in books as often as it should.  He also uses ultramarine and cerulean blue.  In fact, some of his work with cerulean is making me wonder whether it should return to my palette in place of cobalt as my opaque blue - it's not as if I've used cobalt blue in a long time.

So, yes, this book was amazing and I'm so pleased I bought it in time.  You should order a copy while you still can,  it's an easy five palettes from me for a book that's (at the time of writing) up there in my all time top five.

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