This book keeps popping up on my Amazon recommendations. When I took a look inside,…
Contemporary Figures In Watercolour: Leo Crane & Joseph Butler – Book Review
This is a really good looking book. It’s 128 pages long and not just a hard app back but a hardback where all the words on the cover have been embossed. It’s not just the colourful painting on the front that makes me want to keep running my fingers all over the cover. I bought this the other day after spotting that the price had dropped to £8.70 after being stuck at around £14 in the eight months since it was released. Honestly, if you have a list of books or CDs that you’re wanting to buy when the prices drop to a certain level, you should check out U.K.camelcamelcamel.com and get it monitoring prices for you. I get no commission or anything like that for giving you that advice.
This is one of those books, like the David Bellamy Arctic Light and Arabian Light books that I don’t have and maybe the Bill Buchman book that I do, where most (if not all) of the benefit I get from the book is by looking at the pictures. The artwork in the book is generally fantastic and I find myself looking closely at it, trying to work out what all the marks mean and how I could do something similar with my own work.
I found text in the book, though, to be pretty lacking. There’s the usual bit in there about equipment, mark making and the colour wheel that I already know about but otherwise there wasn’t very much constructive advice in there. The writing style had some passion but the passion was all funnelled into a lot of arty farty stuff that didn’t make much sense. That’s not to say there weren’t any useful tips – it’s just that they were either given in a very roundabout way or buried under faff.
At about page 100, the authors seem to have run out of things to say. The book at this point abandons figure drawing and moves on to animals, still lifes, landscapes and saying some nice things about some of the models in the book.
All in all, when I look at my criteria for rating books, this is a two or three palette book. It feels a step down from some of the other books I’ve awarded three palettes. Three stars, though, on Amazon for all the inspiration I get from it (and you’ll notice Leo Crane has been added to my list of links to favourite artists). Palettes are not the same as stars.
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