En Plein Air Watercolor, Ron Stocke – Book Review

With all this painting I’m currently doing out and around the villages, I thought I’d start my birthday reading with this book.  It’s 128 pages long.

It covers everything that you’d expect: setting up, composition, perspective, drawing, painting, colour and values.  While it was never especially deep in any of those areas, there were definitely some interesting tips in there that I’ve not seen in other places and that will be useful to me.

There are four worked examples in the book.  These are at the level that suits me: not too many steps and written in a “this is what I did” style rather than “do this, do that”.  These may be the highlight of the book. The big lesson from them is in Ron’s technique of laying down colourful underpaintings before he even thinks about doing any proper “colouring in” (my words, definitely not Ron’s) painting.  The blue underpainting that features on the bigger painting of which the book cover shows only a small detail is a moment of genius that makes me want to paint people under awnings.

Overall, this scores two palettes.  I learned stuff from it but not enough to justify that third star.

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