Painting Spectacular Light Effects in Watercolor [Hardcover]

This title is separated onto two videos, part 1 about 1 hour 15 min, part 2 about 1 hour. (I couldn't get an exact time count for tape 2. It varied every time I timed it. Maybe the tape material was stretching?)

It begins with a brief bio of his training and awards, showing several of his painings in the background.

Then, a brief intro to some basic techniques, flat wash, graded wash, wet in wet, but nothing else.

Then he begins to demonstrate his painting, a foggy landscape, mostly done wet in wet.

The value of these videos is to see his demonstration of him actually painting. You see every stroke, which is very good for learning. Camera angles and audio are excellent.

But he doesn't teach design, composition, value sketch, color mixing theory, etc. If you want to learn these basics of painting you are better off with Tony Couch or Tom Lynch videos. But it is valuable to see Paul do his demo because he talks about his thinking process as he paints. It is always valuable to see how a painter thinks about his painting, his process, rather than just staying with cold techniques. These videos are excellent for that.

He points out how the water & paint behaves, how he corrects or covers up mistakes, how he layers paint to get rich values, how he choses colors he is using, how he changes his designing, etc. Its amazing how he gets his effects with his huge brushes and lots of water.

He usually names the colors he uses, mostly Winsor & Newton. But as he doesn't talk about color mixing theory, or quality of paints, he doesn't talk about permanant or fugitive clolors. At one point he mentions he is now using a *permanant* Alizarin Crimson, a historically fugitive color. (Genuine Alizarin is fugitive, which means it will fade or change over time with sunlight shining on it, and you shouldn't use it since there are permanant substitute paints for this color. *Premanant* Alizarin is most likely made up from these permanant substitue paints, but companies preserve the old name so thay can make money.) But then he uses *huge* amounts of Winsor Violet, which I belive is made of of Dioxazine, which is a fugitve color! (I hope I'm correct in this and not making a fool of myself. If I am, I appologize in advance.) According to Michael Wilcox's book, "The Wilcox Guide to the Best Watercolor Paints", he states that Dioxazine is a fugitive color. So why 1) does Mr Jackson use it if he switched to a *Permanant* Alizarin, and 2) why does Winsor & Newton continue to put out fugitve colors for sale at all???? (Read Wilcox's books to learn how to mix violets and purples using permanant colors as well as find out which paints are fugitive and which are permanant.)

While it is wonderful to see Mr. Jackson demo his painting, the whole video is *continually* broken up everytime he needs a break to dry his paper with *numerous* silly interviews of clients and samples of his paintings. These breaks happen at different times, after 5min, 12min, 17min, 24min, etc.

Showing samples of his beautiful paintings at these breaks is acceptable, although time consuming if you want to keep the actual demo on *one* VHS tape. You can go to his web site to see all his paintings. But the interviews are totally frustrating.

The interviews are of some of his clients/patrons: eg. Gov of Missouri, his 1st Lady, and several Doctors. These are more like infomercials. All they say is how wonderful Paul Jackson is, how much they like and are amazed by his art work, how his art is so detailed "it looks like photographs", how he paints upside down even though "that's impossible, but he does it!", etc. These "infomercial" commentaries are TOTALLY USELESS!!! They take up valuable video time and waste the viewer's time. These are all distinguised people, clients, patrons, nice people who really appreciate his work, but with all due respect, who cares about their comments! They are not artists. I bought the video to see Paul paint, not hear non artists babble on and on singing his praises and their amazments! I already know how wonderful he is and am amazed by his art myself, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the video and his book! I don't need nor want their comments. Its a total waste!

These breaks are short, 30 sec to 1 min each, but are so numerous, between 20-30 of them or more, they break up the flow of the video. I tried to time them to see how much time they took. Between the two videos, the infomercial interviews totalled to about 8 min, and the gallery of his paintings totalled to about 8-10min. Not much time total, but because there are so many of them, they are very frustrating and intrusive.

If the tapes had totally eliminated these useless interviews/comments and edited down the samples of his gallery of paintings, he could have fitted his *actual demo* onto a single 2 hour tape. Why, we need to ask, was it spread out onto 2 tapes with so much filler?

I rated the video with 4 stars instead of 5 because of these useless interviews. I would recommend this set of videos to actually see him paint. You just need to ignor the interviews. You can learn a lot just from observation and hearing *HIS* comments! If you get his book, you will get more step by step instructions.

If he ever does another video, which I would love to see of his tighter style, I would recommend: 1) DROP THE USELESS INFOMERCIAL INTERVIEWS! LET YOUR ART SPEAK FOR ITSELF. LET YOUR PAINTING DEMO SPEAK FOR ITSELF. and 2)show more of your planning, design stage. This is just as important as seeing you actually paint.