This one's one step up from Frank Clarke. It's about painting landscapes in a fairly…
Learn To Paint Watercolour With The Experts, Crawshaw/Bellamy/Ranson/Soan – Book Review
This is a weird one that I’d forgotten I even owned. It looks big at 224 pages but when you open it up, you find that it’s made up of four short books combined into one. From the days when art books were 64 page pamphlets rather than the 128 page hardbacks that seem to have dominated over the last ten years. Let’s go through those books one by one.
First up is Sketching For Watercolour by Alwyn Crawshaw. It’s the only one of these four subbooks that I can’t find out of print on Amazon, so it’s possible that it could have been written especially to be included in this book. I’ve just flicked through this bit a couple of times and am struggling to find any sort of unifying message within it. With only 40 pages, this needed to be focussed on ether pencil sketching or watercolour sketching, not aimlessly flirting between the two. Poor show.
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The second subbook is Watercolour Landscapes by David Bellamy. It’s aimed at the same developmental stage as Big Brush Watercolour by Ron Ranson but the paintings look much more colourful and vibrant. With only 54 pages to play with, I thought it was a bit of a waste including four step by step demonstrations. I’d rather have seen the demos left out and this section of the book extended to 128 pages and published separately. I expect there’s a Bellamy book like that somewhere, in which case it might be worth you checking it out, but I’ve left that stage of my development behind, so you’d be on your own.
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The third subbook is Skies In Watercolour by Ron Ranson. Now I remember why I bought this book. I’d seen this 54-page subbook sitting on a spinner but wasn’t prepared to fork out good money for something that was thinner than some football programmes. Including it in a big hardback sealed the deal for me, with the other three subbooks being seen as bonuses. In its day I think this was the definitive book on skies but Coates may have surpassed it now. Still, you’d be amazed how much it’s possible to write about skies.
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And last up is Vibrant Watercolurs by Hazel Soan. When I bought the book, this subbook stood out like a sore thumb. The vibrancy burst out of the pages, making the other three sections look as if they’ve been printed in black and white. Fifteen years later, I can see that this subbook is aimed at more experienced artists than the first three. It’s much more like the sort of instruction book I’m interested in today. This subbook does hang together but feels a bit light. More like a teaser for the bigger books that Hazel will go on to write in future, so not a subbook that I would buy. I also thought it was a waste of Hazel’s talent to include some demonstrations.
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Overall, I give this book two palettes. Looking at it as a whole, it’s one giant unfocused hodgepodge.
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