America’s grand introduction to the West came through the paintings of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson, and others. They captured the landscapes with big, moving imagery that drew the world’s attention to canyon country, the Great Plains, towering, snowcapped mountains, and deep chasms.

While most travelers these days carry cameras in one form or another to capture the landscapes they encounter, there’s something about brushstrokes that bring so much more to what rises up in front of us, whether it’s the Grand Teton, an aspen glade, Half Dome, or the rutted panorama of Badlands National Park.

As Denis Diderot attests in an introductory chapter to this hardcover book, “A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture. It is the artist’s work when he is full of inspiration and ardor, when reflection has toned down nothing.”

Mastering those brushstrokes has been a never-ending challenge for me, but there could be hope in Molly Hashimoto’s book. Not quite 200 pages, the book nevertheless holds 170 illustrations that are laid out by color.

Green, for instance, is conveyed through a tranquil watercolor of a canoe at dock on the shore of Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park (at the North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center). Blue comes across via the tranquil waters of Lake Crescent, with the mountains of Olympic National Park slowly vanishing into the distance.

Gold shows up in both the rockscape of Pompeys Pillar National Monument in Montana and the North Entrance archway to Yellowstone National Park. Ms. Hashimoto shows off the Painted Hills of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Pinnacles National Park, among others, for red, while the cliffs of Bandelier National Monument and the Orange Spring Mound in Yellowstone help her define orange.

Violet, not too surprisingly if you’ve visited this park, is captured in the wildflowers of Mount Rainier National Park as well as via the view of the mountain from Berkeley Park, and through a meadow of lupines at North Cascades.

Dividing up the book by these colors, and showing the possibilities, helps us see, and appreciate, some of the finer details of the parks when we visit. And Ms. Hashimoto’s beautiful watercolors give us something to aim for, if we’re so inclined to take palette and paintbrush into the parks and sit a while to take in the landscape.

Interspersed among her watercolors are technical instructions that explain how to tackle some of these settings, such as thermal pools in Yellowstone, how to use a “rainbow approach” of adding bands of color to capture the red-rock hues of the Southwest, the use of a “rigger brush” for grassy vegetation, and “glazing,” in which subsequent washes of color are layered to build the landscape on your paper.

Then, too, the author tells us about some of her “artist heroes,” such as Chiura Obata who painted amazing watercolors of Yosemite National Park, Thomas Moran, who captured Yellowstone in moving images that swayed Congress to declare it the world’s first national park, and the artists of the Western Progress Administration who created iconic national park posters during the 1930s and 40s.

For aspiring artists, this would be an excellent book to pack along for a field course in watercolors, such as those offered by Yellowstone Forever (where Ms. Hashimoto will be one of the instructors), Glacier Institute, the Grand Canyon Association, the North Cascades Institute, and others.

To prepare you for such coursework, Ms. Hashimoto ends the book with a listing of her favorite art materials and outlets. For those not interested in taking brush in hand, this book still offers beautiful images from the National Park System.