Master Class in Water Media: Techniques in Traditional and Experimental Painting

How can experienced watermedia artists continue to develop their skills while cultivating a spirit of experimentation and discovery? How can they push the medium beyond realism to build images that have urgency and power? Where can they seek informed advice and inspired motivation in pursuit of their art?
In Master Class in Watermedia - an updated full-color edition of his Master Class in Watercolor - renowned artist Edward Betts offers solutions to these and other provocative questions. Using his beautiful, luminous work as a point of departure, Betts invites painters who work in transparent watercolor, gouache, casein, acrylic, and mixed media to re-evaluate their materials, procedures, and approaches, and to take risks that will help them to abandon old habits and embrace fresh ways of seeing and painting.
Reviewing basic methods and exploring a variety of techniques, Betts first analyzes traditional sketching strategies (both on-location and in the studio), sources for pictorial images (including photographs, memory, reading, and studio experimentation), and the textures and effects obtainable in each of the watermedia. Collage, mixed-media, and brushless methods are considered as tools for expanding one's repertoire, and for gaining a deeper understanding of the formal possibilities of subject matter. Betts then assesses the complex relationships between nature and abstraction, from descriptive realism to pure design. Finally, readers are encouraged to evaluate their influences and work critically, and to appraise their creative strengths and weaknesses.
Intelligently written and lavishly illustrated with many new works done especially for this version, Master Class in Watermedia is an invaluable source of inspiration for intermediate and advanced watermedia artists.

Edward Betts is a professor emeritus of art at the University of Illinois.