How To Make A Watercolor Paint Itself, Nita Engle – Book Review

As you’d guess, this is a book about experimental techniques but this isn’t a Jane Betteridge or Ann Blockley book.  Jane’s and Ann’s techniques are mainly about creating textures but Nita goes further than this.  As well as textural stuff with soap, salt, sticks, stamps, etc she also talks about experimental techniques to paint water and light.

First water.  I enjoyed all the sections in which Nita reminded us that watercolour was mainly water, so could be left to do its own thing if we want it to imitate water.  There’s lots of stuff there on spraying the paint to make it splash around and on tipping the paper around to let it run.  Her stormy seas are amazing.

And then there’s light.  Nita shows us how to create light by putting down thinly glazed underpaintings, spraying them and letting the water run around.  I’ve seen this sort of thing in demos in books by Ron Stocke and Joseph Stoddard, but in those cases the underpainting was one step in a demo, whereas here it’s the main focus of the story.  Ron and Joseph say “I did this…” or (worse still) “Do this” whereas Nita says “We need this bit to be light, so we make it yellow, we need this bit dark, so we use reds and blues.  And we don’t want green, so we have a band of red between the yellows and blues”.

Nita seems to use a lot of masking fluid.  But I guess that’s something you need to do if you want to reserve the whites but are flinging everything around like a Hungarian who’s just scored at Euro 2021.  Come to think of it (being reflective here) the only times I’ve put down underpaintings have been when I’ve not known what I’m going to paint.  Maybe I need to do a proper landscape with an underpainting at some point with whites reserved.  I may even do this for the local church’s Christmas card.

There’s other stuff too.  There’s composition and making repairs to paintings that don’t quite work.  And there’s even useful stuff on equipment (I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before): the best squirting tools, best paint removal tools, best masking fluid (Pebeo, knew that already) and best source of bubbles.

Nita’s writing style scores highly.  There’s humility there: she talks as if every painting is an experiment.  She even points out that it’s always pot luck whether salt works as a texturing tool.  All of her demos are demos and not a list of instructions (always something I notice).  And there’s a “voice” there.  She doesn’t talk like a robot.  It feels like a proper conversation.

The artwork in here is amazing.  Sometimes you look at a book and don’t like the look of the artwork, but that’s definitely not the case here.  In fact this book only recently made its way to the top of my wishlist because, for a long time, I was put off by the artwork.  It looked too good and suggested that this book might be beyond my abilities.  Deep down, though, it’s a book about experimentation with an emphasis on making the paint do all the work.  And the words around the artwork are enough to identify the particular features of the artwork that Nita wants to talk about.  It’s just that, rather than learning from an artist that I can aspire to match (in terms of quality – I don’t mean match as in copy) I’m learning from an artist that will always be out of my league.  I guess this means I’m not as inspired by the artwork in this book as the artwork in others.  More advanced artists than me, though, will be inspired by Nita’s paintings: in Liron Yanconsky’s review of the book on YouTube, he talks more about the paintings in the book than the techniques!

Still, I like this book and learned a lot from it.  It scores four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨