Improve your skills, explore new techniques, and immerse yourself in the joy of watercolor painting!

Watercolor painting is one of the most popular and satisfying art forms, and it offers many benefits: it accommodates a wide range of techniques and styles, allows for vibrant and luminous qualities in your work, encourages spontaneity and expression, and rewards creativity and exploration. But, like any art form, it also presents challenges that can derail your progress and curtail your ability to create the results you want.

In 101 Watercolor Secrets, painter, illustrator, and teacher Anna Bucciarelli shares the knowledge she’s gained over years of painting with watercolor. Filled with insights, techniques, explanations, and tips, the book is packed with helpful information that will improve your painting skills and knowledge, regardless of where you are on your watercolor journey.

For each topic, the book devotes two pages to explanation, instruction, and hands-on tips and techniques, along with Anna’s beautiful work that visually illustrates the topics and techniques. You’ll learn all about:

• The tools you need: Gain a deeper understanding of papers, brushes, bristles, masking fluid, gloves, and more

• Pigments, color, and color mixing: Learn about pigments, hues, and how to select and mix colors for greenery, violets, skin tones, and more

• How to create your own palette: Curate a palette that reflects your unique style and vision

• Essential techniques you need to know: Learn about wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and wet-on-damp techniques, as well as negative painting, lifting and pouring techniques, glazing, underpainting, and more

• How to deal with common mistakes and challenges, such as avoiding overpainting, mastering water control, creating crisp edges, and getting tonal values right

• Painting popular subject matter: Learn the secrets for painting flower petals and stems, birds and their feathers, eyes, fur and hair, portraits, skin tones, and white subject matter (such as snow)

• Creating powerful and successful compositions, as well as other secrets and techniques that cover light and shadow, color temperature, and palette continuity

Whether you’re a novice embarking on your artistic journey or a seasoned painter looking to refine your skills, 85 Watercolor Secrets is an indispensable resource that offers practical guidance, artistic inspiration, and wealth of knowledge to enrich your creative work and elevate your craft.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Decoding the Labels

Chapter 2: Exploring Color Families

Chapter 3: Building Your Signature Palette

Chapter 4: Tools that Matter Most

Chapter 5: Essential Techniques

Chapter 6: Favorite Subjects

Chapter 7: Addressing Mistakes and Common Challenges

Chapter 8: Composition

Chapter 9: Mixing Marvels

Chapter 10: Other Secrets

Glossary

Anna Bucciarelli is a Toronto-based professional illustrator, primarily known for her designs of Canada’s most stunning collectible coins, treasured for their rarity and craftsmanship. Her artwork has appeared on Starbucks holiday cups, New York Times’ bestselling book covers, and colorful murals on the streets of Toronto. Anna’s unique style is influenced by her training in Eastern European folk art, focusing on intricate floral and plant motifs. She brings together various forms of traditional media, such as ink and watercolor, and introduces digital elements that bring delicate, exquisite detail to her designs.

Anna Bucciarelli's profile page