| Special Limited Edition | |
| eBook | £11.99 from Gumroad |
| Second Edition | £42.99 from Amazon |
| £30.00 from Andrew |
A reprint of Andrew's first book, Seasons and Reflections: Notes on Painting in Watercolour is now available in a new 260-page hardback with 160 illustrations of original watercolours by Andrew. You can purchase it through Amazon for £42.99 or have it shipped directly by Andrew at the discount price of £30. If you'd like to take advantage of this discount rate, please click here for details.
Have you ever tried watercolour but been disappointed with the results? Have you read watercolour books and tried the exercises in them, but rather than feeling inspired to paint more, become bored and remembered the bins need taking out?
Seasons and Reflections is a love story to watercolour. Written by artist and tutor Andrew Pitt, and summarising a lifetime of over 60 years of watercolour experience, covering failures, mistakes and even the occasional success, Andrew distils the essence of watercolour, shares his experiences of teaching yourself to paint and shows how you can fall in love with the medium and produce clean, fresh watercolours.
Andrew is a watercolour practitioner and craftsman first. Without resorting to gadgets and one-off tricks he explains the importance of understanding drawing, tone, edges, colour and texture, stripping away complications to focus only on what is necessary and sufficient.
This is not a conventional how-to painting book; there are already plenty of books which describe how to lay in a large wash. Andrew thinks the best method of learning to paint is to get on with painting pictures rather than boring practice exercises. Painting in watercolour is simple. But that is not the same as easy. This book concentrates on how to look and render your vision in a direct simple way: how to communicate visually with watercolour, with a major emphasis on simplicity. Using simple painting equipment, a simple range of colours and brushes, and a simple, direct painting approach, the book and illustrations demonstrate the power and sincerity of simplicity.
With over 150 full-colour illustrations, covering a wide range of conventional and surprising subjects from Santa to pickup trucks, Andrew’s aim is to paint clean, fresh watercolours which celebrate the subject and retain the unique characteristics of watercolour.
Seasons and Reflections will inspire you to pick up your brush and paint whatever is in front of you.
"The book is wonderful! I read the first 60 pages today. The book indeed is a visual feast. It is well written and presented, and exciting to read as it is beautifully illustrated. Andrew's thoughts and notes on pure watercolour painting are helpful, more so than any book or article I’ve read to date. He clearly demonstrates in his book and videos that one does not need to rely on fancy brushes, gadgets, one-off tricks, or the wet-on-wet approach to produce a great watercolour painting. The book is timely and needed." - Dirk Schmid
"As I leaf through your book, I realize what it is: a great summary of simple and basic truths in a great, time honoured tradition, not only of watercolour, but of painting in general. I’m fully aware of most of the concepts discussed, but there are so many it is easy to loose track and stray into the jungle! This volume would save many of us a lot of valuable time and set beginners onto the right path early on. For those with a bit more experience, it is a fountain to which they can always turn to when lost in self-doubt. I think the key to getting the most out of this one, is to go through it, again and again, back and forth, until it’s absorbed “organically”, like through a sponge. - Edvard Skerjanc (Canada, via email).
"This is one of those rare treasures that must be held, and owned in hard back. Amazing, Mr. Pitt, how you state you’re not sure what you can add to the myriad of precious books already out there on watercolour and then you go on to add so very much. Each page is packed with wisdom and with your humble astuteness. If I permitted myself to deface a book with highlights my copy would be completely marked! It’s a beautiful glimpse into the journey of a modern day master. - LK via Instagram
"An excellent book beautifully illustrated and packed with practical advice. Highly recommended" - RB via Instagram
"I have been struck by your wonderful writing style. You manage to sound like someone engaged in an ordinary, everyday conversation with the reader. Information is conveyed in a manner that is completely natural, unpretentious, simple, direct and clear (just like you). This down-to-earth tone creates a sense of rapport. The reader almost feels as if he knows you, almost as if you were an old friend. This is a remarkable achievement and makes the book a genuine pleasure to read." - ES (via email)
"I’m halfway through the book and I can say it is without a doubt one of, if not the, best instructional watercolor book that I’ve ever read. And I’ve read quite a few. As much as I hated to do it I am using a highliter for all of the tidbits of wisdom (and there are numerous) that I want refer to: “go for the finish straight away”, “touch the paper with the brush only once”. “Loose comes about by being careful”. "When I did not succeed very often it was usually because I wasn’t bold enough in the beginning”. “overpainting darks because you didn’t get them dark enough with the first wash is the killer of freshness”. “taking more time in the earlier stages of a painting saves time later on”. “The doing is relatively quick; it’s the thinking that takes the time”. Absolute gems!" - R (Massachusetts, via email)
We've been really surprised and flattered by the reception to Season and Reflections. The book has sold around the world and been shipped to over a dozen countries. When we originally published it, we weren't expecting anything like this level of interest and consequently it sold out faster than we expected. Thank you so much for all your interest!
Publishing books is hard, and even more so when self-publishing a hardback. Season and Reflections is a large book, so just storing all the copies is a challenge. The first print run filled an entire room in our house. And this is to say nothing of the logistics of packaging and shipping it around the world.
When we came to look at a reprint in 2022 the publishing landscape had changed. Paper and printing costs had nearly tripled making the book prohibitively expensive to print and requiring a huge initial outlay. Instead we made available a digital eBook at a reduced price so that more people would be able to enjoy the book.
While an eBook works well on an iPad or tablet, there does remain something special about a physical copy of a book, especially for a large artbook like this, which you can flip through and be inspired by and so we've explored alternative ways to make the book available in physical form. The original special edition was a sewn cloth hardback, printed on 150gsm silk paper with a dust jacket and gold foil blocking and we wanted to maintain this quality in any reprints. After numerous experiments, we settled upon a print on demand service provided by Amazon, which produces colour hardbacks that are high enough quality to reproduce the paintings well. It doesn't feature a dust-jacket or gold blocking, and the paper is slightly thinner matt, but the pictures have reproduced accurately, and, equally importantly, the book is nice to hold in your hands and read.
This new edition is portrait rather than landscape which has necessitated reformatting the book. Consequently, some pictures appear on different pages but all the same images are featured. The different orientation has its advantages though. Although landscape pictures are slightly smaller, portrait pictures are much larger.
The second edition also contains a few corrections for minor typographical errors, but the general text remains un-edited.
Perhaps the biggest change is that we took the opportunity to digitally enhance and improve the images. A few of the images in the first book didn't reproduce as well as we would have liked, and appeared darker on the page than in reality. In this new edition we went back to the original photographs and digitally enhanced them to better recreate the look and feel of the original artwork. Every single image has been painstakingly rebalanced and enhanced so even the images that looked good in the first edition look even better in this second version. You can see one example of such below. On the left is the new second edition. On the right is the original special edition. You can see also how the new format benefits portrait images.
While the second edition doesn't feature the dust jacket and binding of the original and the images are printed in matt rather than gloss, it is an enhanced and improved version, featuring vastly improved reproductions of the images. It's available now from Amazon for £42.99 or shipped directly from Andrew at the discount price of £30. If you'd like to take advantage of this discount rate, please click here for details.