Nature In Watercolour, Waltraud Nawratil – Book Review

This book was reduced to under a tenner on Amazon and I thought I deserved a treat after setting up the new website, so I bought a copy. It’s a paperback, a little thin at 112 pages and is one of those 9×9 inch square ones that always seem to be about abstracts.

The introduction and pleasantries (including discussion of materials and equipment) are mercifully short and by page 12 we’re on to the demonstrations that make up the whole of the rest of the book. More than half of these are paintings of flowers but there are lots of examples of trees too (which I was particularly interested in) and one of a mountain. All the demonstrations have 4–6 steps and are worded like instructions rather than demonstrations.

And I have a lot of issues with those demonstrations. Let’s go down the list:

• Only the first six demonstrations have a photo after each step : the other thirty only show the final painting. In the the thirty it’s not easy to match the instructions to how they came out in the final painting.
• Even in the demos with multiple photos, I’m not convinced that the photos match up to the steps
• Most of the steps are actually multiple steps (four or five?) combined into single paragraphs
• The wording assumes I’m an expert in flower names. Do this to the delphinium, that to the amaryllis. I’m lost. This is where more steps and matching photos would have helped.
• Many of the paintings are very samey, in terms of both subject and technique. Once you’ve seen one flower and one tree you’ve pretty well seen it all.
• Five of the multiple photo demos are of flowers and only one of a tree. Could have done with more of them being trees.
• There’s a lot of spattering in the demos and judging from the photos they seem quite big spatters. I’d like to see how Waltraud achieved this. How thick was the paint she used? How big were the spatters before she sprayed water on them? I don’t know the answers – all I get to see is the result after the spatters have been sprayed and left to dry. More detail is needed.

By the end of the book I was feeling a bit underwhelmed, although I did pick up maybe three interesting ideas that I’ll be trying out on some tree paintings and it’s quite inspiring just to look at some of these paintings and to see just how loose an artist can make things, with just the odd wavy stroke for sky or water. But, let’s be honest, the Jean Haines book on flowers smashes this one out of the park in terms of readability, clarity, inspiration, length and is a hardback. I’d recommend it ahead of this one all day long. The only thing Waltraud does that Jean doesn’t to include a bit on trees and a bit more foreground and background. That’s not enough for a second star though.

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