Everyday Watercolor

“Step one, step two.. LOOK AT MY MASTERPIECE!” The first few exercises of this, practicing technique without trying to actually make it look like something specific, we're alright. Then as it progressed, I could feel my perfectionism kicking in. “Paint this leaf you've never heard of...and at the end of the chapter you finally get some sense of what it should look like. “Draw two C curves...” yea I can follow the instruction and it will look NOTHING like what she says, until I turn the page and just follow the sketch she demonstrates. Not sure if author over-anticipates the clarity of her words or what. Then she has the gall to add, the “Isn't this easy and fun?” comments, and I'm still wondering how she got from here to there, because I'm following the steps and surely something is missing. I think more time could be spent on technique outside of replicating-life application, and I think it would be easier to follow if more numerical step-wise instruction rather than paragraphs. And a lot more specifics. Ok, toucan is facing left. Not until I see her finished piece do I notice her toucan is facing away and turning its head left, rather than...simply facing left. Kind of a difference there.

The instructions are such that I even managed to ‘screw up'. In that, with the dragonfruit whole and half, it was unclear that I wasn't supposed to do the wash on the inside of the half fruit, until it was too late.

She makes assumptions that reader has background in art to know what ‘envisioning your light source' would look like, and that you are right-handed. I'm almost done- day 22- and after washing both mountains read I was only supposed to do the first, and the second comes later (for what reason I don't know). She goes to final layer and “make any final marks on the piece” apparently means “add a **ton of little details”.

I plan to finish this book, if nothing else to have some ‘timestamps' of my ability development, but I decided I think in week two that I don't really like it, the instruction could be much clearer, and I look forward to finding new material that doesn't try to incorporate light source, color mixing, and life-replication all in one go. WOW is an interesting thing to really grasp well as to how it works, and I can spend a lot more time there. I did learn in this book, more about sketching than I expected, but I'm looking forward to different books moving forward. If you have any perfectionistic tendencies, I do NOT recommend this book. I did a web lesson on values that I felt came out much better; I don't feel like she really teaches how to get good gradient depth representation. And, even as a beginner, there could be more spent on color mixing. (It's one thing to follow her instructions, another to try following her instructions when you don't have her exact palette, and yet another when you're new and don't know how to get the paints from the pans to the palette for mixing, whether cross-contamination is ok, how much of each to use). I'm still really confused how you start with a light wash which is really dilute, and then suddenly have a more saturated version of the same color for the value.