Watercolor Masters And Legends, Betsy Dillard Stroud – Book Review

This is a 160-page hardback that I had one eye on and that I lashed out and bought when it dropped to under a fiver on Amazon.

It talks about eighteen “masters” and sixteen “legends”.  Everybody gets at least two page spread with some anecdotal biographical information and example paintings.  The masters are each extended to six pages with a two page demonstration and two more pages of paintings.

What attracted me to the book was that many of the featured artists had abstract styles that might generate interesting ideas.  I wasn’t expecting to be instructed very much.  And I did pick up some interesting ideas.  It just happened that I tended to pick up these ideas in the demonstrations rather than from just looking at pictures – the demos showed off some techniques that I never would have been able to work out from just looking at the paintings.

So I didn’t learn much from the legends – their paintings were just presented to me and the accompanying text didn’t really say much about the artists’ styles.  And with the masters, I only really got ideas from the demos, and even then only from about half of them.  Which means I didn’t learn much and that there are vast tracts of the book that I may well never read or look at again.  Maybe I’m being unfair judging this book on the difference it makes to my artwork (as opposed to its merits as a recreational read) but I’m only going to give it one palette.