Book excerpt: No matter what medium you are working in, you can create paintings that are interesting to your viewer. Popular painter and instructor Tony Couch shows you how! Tony Couch maintains that the key to producing credible work lies within the mastery of two basic skills: drawing and design. There are only a few simple principles of design at the foundation of any successful painting, and Tony Couch demonstrates how you can apply these principles to create visually appealing paintings. Once you begin to understand and use the principles taught in this book, you can consciously incorporate them into your work. You'll learn to make your paintings interesting through color harmony, repetition, balance, and dominance, but at the same time create visual appeal through variety, contrast, and gradation. Tony Couch's Keys to Successful Painting breaks down the fundamentals of painting design. Couch demonstrates how to arrange shapes, size, lines, color, and values to create stunning compositions. Because Tony Couch reduces design to a few rules applied to a limited number of elements, you'll find his ideas easy to remember. The sheer number of paintings included here that illustrate these principles allow you to see how they work in practice. Painters of all mediums can create unforgettable works with Tony Couch's invaluable design advice. Tony Couch received his bachelor's degree from the University of Tampa and studied with Edgar A. Whitney at the Pratt Institute in New York City. During a 31-year career as a commercial airline pilot, Couch advanced his watercolor painting skills at workshops with Ed Whitney, Milford Zornes, Robert E. Wood, Zoltan Szabo, and others. He has written articles on watercolor instruction for North Light, American Artist, and Palette Talk, and has produced a popular series of videos on watercolor painting. He teaches watercolor workshops worldwide and has won over 50 awards. Couch maintains membership to a number of art societies and is also the author of Watercolor: You Can Do It and Watercolor Techniques.