Zoltan Szabo’s 70 Favourite Watercolor Techniques – Book Review

Another book review.  Today it’s Zoltan Szabo’s 70 Favourite Watercolor (sic) Techniques.  I bought this a couple of days ago after spotting that it was out of stock at Amazon and that it was written back in 1995.  This could have been my last chance to buy it, so I went for it.  It’s 144 pages long and is a paperback but (like that Jane Betteridge book) a resilient paperback with a thick, glossy, folded over cover that shouldn’t get dog-eared.

As you can imagine, the book is one big collection of interesting watercolour techniques.  And I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were plenty of new, interesting techniques there.  Off the top of my head, there were ways to use a palette knife, the crazy idea of curtain glazes and “charging a wash” which is like wet into wet but more watery into wet.  Lots of interesting stuff.  Just like with the Jeanne Dobie Book, I felt like I should have been taking notes, although I didn’t find this book to be quite as dense with new ideas as Jeanne’s.

There’s a chapter on the ten rules of reflections that is almost worth the price of admission on its own.  The stuff about what gets reflected on the near side of a wave and what gets reflected on the far side was nothing short of excellent.  The sort of thing I’m expecting to see in that James Gurney Colour And Light Book when it eventually ends up in my collection.

There’s inspiration to be found in Zoltan’s artwork too.  His landscapes have lots of neutral colours in them but they’re the sort of vibrant greys that Jeanne Dobie talks about rather than the lifeless earth colours that I’ve seen in Ron Ranson and Richard Taylor books.  And he even has an abstract side to some of his work.

The worst thing about this book is probably the writing style.  Maybe it was translated from a foreign language by someone without any writing skills.  Or maybe Szabo was a poor writer.  In any case, I probably learned more from looking at paintings and at photos of techniques being used than I did from the text.  He also referred quite often to glazing without explaining what it was (thanks Jeanne Dobie for telling us in your book!) and I did get a bit tired of being told every single colour that was used at every single step.

There were some step-by-step demonstrations at the end of the book that suffered from having too few steps.  Quite often, there were so many things happening in the first step that it wasn’t clear which bit of the painting the text was talking about.

Anyway, despite the bad writing, I learned enough from this book for it to be worth a fourth palette.

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