Push your watercolor painting to the next level by mastering the use of color, light, and shadows. Go beyond trying to copy what you see by designing with shapes, shadows, and highlights. Deepen the expressive nature of your paintings as you capture the subject's luminosity. Master painter William B. Lawrence offers hands-on techniques and insights for intermediate to advanced artists. Light and color take the viewer on a journey. Properly harnessed, they can convey emotion, create a mood, or tell a story. Whether your work is realistic, expressive, or abstract, the options are unlimited. Lawrence explores pattern, hue, contrast, and texture in this treasured classic. Using a combination of theory, demonstration, and practical suggestions this new arsenal of tools, will help you grow as an artist. Other techniques covered include: How to design with light and shadow The use of overlapping patterns How light can express movement Learning to use light and dark to add drama and intensity to your work Discover how to guide the viewer's eye through floodlights, spotlights, and other advanced light-manipulation techniques. Painting Light and Shadow in Watercolor will help you create radiant watercolor paintings and give you greater painting pleasure as you develop new skills which bring your imagination to life.

More than 130 artists briefly describe how they achieved light and shadow in the watercolor paintings selected for this collection.

Without shading, even a beautiful drawing can appear flat. But artists can learn to add dimension to their work with these techniques, illustrations, and exercises that show how to achieve effects with light and shadow.

“Form,” writes the author, “is developed by means of light and shade; without these every object would appear flat.” Originally published in the mid-nineteenth century, this classic approach to three-dimensional drawing was the first book to provide art students with instructions for correctly illustrating perspective outlines of various objects. An art historian noted for her authoritative reference works, Merrifield clearly demonstrates the principles of light and shade by revealing the effects of common daylight, sunshine, and candle or artificial light on geometrical solids. Her simple explanations are accompanied by illustrations of cubes, prisms, pyramids, cylinders, spheres, ovals, and cones. As useful and practical today as it was when first published well over a century ago, Light and Shade provides beginning and advanced art students with valuable insights into effective drawing and sketching.

(back cover) Titles in Barron's Drawing Academy series guide beginning students through a detailed training course in the art of drawing. The books open with basic instruction, then proceed to analyze the details that make up a successfully executed drawing. Drawing Academy titles make fine self-instruction manuals and can also serve as textbooks in formal art classes. LEARNING BY DOING Constant practice teaches you to analyze the characteristics and understand the difficulties you must overcome in developing techniques to produce light and shadow effects. Exercises will teach you mastery of strokes, shadings, and tonal ranges. ANALYSIS It is not enough to practice. You must also learn to see. The Analysis Section following each exercise shows how professional artists resolve difficulties and achieve desired graphic effects in their drawings. You'll learn to profit from others' achievements and incorporate some of their solutions and effects into your own work. SKETCHBOOK A section at the end of each chapter is the sketchbook section. It allows you to analyze the difficulties you encountered and isolate different parts of your overall composition to measure your success in attempting light and shadow effects, tone-building processes, applying tonal scales, and fully developing your draftsman's skills. Available titles in Drawing Academy Series: The Basics of Drawing Line and Shading in Drawing Light and Shadow in Drawing

"A wonderful introduction to the workings of the Hollywood system. We learn in rich and yet accessible detail about special effects, technical wizardry and gadgetry, lighting, make-up, the breakdown of crews, and filming strategies. The book is legendary and its reprint is a major event for film study."—Dana Polan, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Discover simple and effective techniques that will infuse your watercolor paintings with stunning highlights and vivid depths, all demonstrated in clear step-by-step exercises. Inside you will learn how to: Create paintings brimming with color using transparent layering techniques Innovate with masking materials to create crisp edges and eye-catching light effects Use tone and contrast to bring your paintings to life Packed with practical information for using color and light, Paint Watercolors that Dance with Light will transform your art.