The Essence Of Watercolour, Hazel Soan – Book Review

This was a really quick read.  I got through it in one evening.  There are chapters on colours, wet into wet, brush strokes, values, light and shadow, correcting errors, simplification and learning to see.  All of the chapters are full of useful tips and, while there are some insights that will make a difference to my work, a lot of it was stuff that I already knew.  A lot of it felt a bit shallow and introductory.  I’m wondering whether this book is made up of eight introductions that will be covered more deeply in eight more Hazel Soan books (especially given that she’s already written two of those on colour and light and shade). But unlike (say) Expressive Watercolours by Joseph Stoddard, the lack of a chapter on materials makes it clear that this isn’t a book for beginners.

This doesn’t sound great so far and you’re probably wondering (spoiler alert) why this book gets four palettes rather than three.  Well, there are three reasons:

– Hazel Soan is a great author and exudes so much passion in her writing that you want to go straight outside and paint.

– While a lot of the tips in the book weren’t new to me, it wouldn’t be right for me to mark the book down for this.  If I’d read it a year ago, I’d be raving about how much it had taught me.  And about how packed the book was with tips – there’s almost something on every page.

– And, most of all, there’s more to the book than tips.  The paintings in the book that are used to illustrate Hazel’s tips do more than that.  They inspire me to go out and pant impressionistically with weird choices of colours.  There are pictures in there, for example, of lion cubs with all sorts of blues, reds and greens in their fur.  They’re there to illustrate why to use transparent colours in one place and how to paint wet into wet in another but I pick up different lessons from them.

So this gets four palettes.  Until Hazel Soan writes the book I really want to see with lots of demos on impressionistic paintings of animals with weird colour choices, I’ll just have to keep flicking through this book for inspiration.  And searching out that YouTube video of her painting elephants.

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