Painting Animals In Watercolour, Liz Chaderton – Book Review

But what lacks in size, it makes up for in content.  The information in this book is crammed in really tightly, with barely any room to breathe between tips.  It’s like the notes I make on all these books – all fish and no batter.

My guess is that only about half of this book is actually related to painting animals, with there being a lot of stuff in there that’s just about using watercolours.  That just-about-watercolours stuff is tightly packed in, as I say, but most of it is stuff that I already knew from other books.  On the other hand, there’s the odd animal-related tip dropped into those bits of the book, so you can’t just skim through it.

The half of the book that is actually about painting animals does have lots of really useful tips.  It’s more about general things like eyes and legs than about specific animals (for which Liz points us towards the Tim Pond book that’s on my wishlist) and I think that’s what’s needed.  Generalities rather than specifics.  There are demos in the book of paintings of a hare, stag, cat dog and ram.  These are the sorts of demo that I like.  All of them being genuine demonstrations rather than lists of instructions about how to copy the painting and all having only a small number of steps rather than detailing every brushstroke.

All the paintings in the book (including the demos) are inspirational.  Liz has a loose style, similar to that of Jean Haines but a lot less watery.

It’s a solid three palettes from me.  This feels like a very good foundation to painting animals in watercolour but it’s only a foundation and I was left wanting to know more about painting animals while feeling stuffed from making my way through such a lot of non-animal specific padding.  Remember three palettes is a decent score and means that the book was worth buying.

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