13 Best Watercolor Books

Jenna Rainey organizes watercolor practice into 30 daily lessons, beginning with foundational strokes, shapes, and patterns. Illustrated exercises build progressively toward finished paintings, offering beginners and developing artists a structured way to explore technique and develop their own style.

Gordon MacKenzie combines his watercolor notebooks on general technique and landscapes into one illustrated collection. Principles, demonstrations, and practical observations address the creative process, encouraging painters to explore possibilities through experimentation rather than rely on a rigid set of rules.

This introductory painting course covers drawing, composition, perspective, colour, and techniques for landscape subjects. Guided exercises lead into complete watercolour projects, with transferable outline drawings helping beginners practise skies, trees, water, buildings, and figures.

Emma Block introduces watercolor through 40 illustrated, step-by-step lessons using a basic palette, brushes, and paper. Projects explore subjects such as pets, flowers, plants, and travel, alongside color mixing and layering for creating artwork, cards, and gifts.

Shirley Trevena explains the decisions behind ten watercolor paintings through detailed demonstrations and close-up images. She explores unconventional composition, perspective, texture, and strong color combinations, encouraging readers to experiment with the medium and reconsider established approaches to painting.

Ana Victoria Calderón introduces watercolor materials and techniques through simple motifs, lettering, and decorative projects. Exercises develop layering and brush control before bringing painted designs together with other materials for personal artwork and handmade applications.

Jean Haines explains her expressive approach to watercolor through examples, exercises, and projects across different subjects. She connects influences on her painting with ways of using color and fluid washes to develop a freer personal style.

Veronica Ballart Lilja encourages watercolor experimentation through exercises, theory, and unconventional materials such as salt and combs. Her guide offers beginners and experienced painters ways to move beyond familiar subjects and methods while developing a freer, more expressive practice.

Kristin Van Leuven introduces watercolor through playful projects involving plants, trees, geometric shapes, and patterns. Lessons cover choosing paints, blending colors, varying brushes and strokes, and adding layers, texture, and resist effects to explore the medium's transparent qualities.

Cathy Johnson introduces watercolor by combining guidance on affordable supplies with exercises and demonstrations. Lessons explain washes, glazing, and drybrush techniques before showing how to paint water, skies, and seasonal trees, following paintings from initial sketches to final strokes.

Ray Hendershot demonstrates ways to add texture and detail to watercolor paintings, particularly landscapes. Step-by-step examples and exercises explore methods including spattering, spritzing, scraping, and blotting, showing how varied surface effects can contribute to a painting's mood.

Leslie Redhead presents a year's worth of short watercolor lessons designed for regular practice. Daily entries alternate among demonstrations, questions and answers, troubleshooting, creative advice, terminology, and exercises, addressing techniques such as glazing, texture, color mixing, and lifting paint.

Michael Reardon explains how perspective, value, and color work together in watercolor landscapes and cityscapes. Eight demonstrations apply lessons on washes, pigment and water, shadows, and architectural subjects to capturing light and the atmosphere of a place.