Leisure Painter
Summer 2018
New to the Ready to Paint in 30 Minutes series from Search Press comes Geoff Kersey's Trees & Woodlands in Watercolour. Aimed at complete beginners, Geoff demonstrates quick and easy exercises that will help you paint convincing trees when you are short on time. Each of the 30-minute paintings is postcard size just 6x4in. and outline drawings are provided on tracing paper so that you can start applying colour straight away. Three complete paintings are included at the end of the book showing how to combine everything you've learned.
Artbookreview.net
For a general appreciation, please look at the series tag above. I like the new iteration of the old Ready to Paint series a lot and these latest volumes diminish that not a jot.
Geoff Kersey is a familiar figure whos well-practised in art instruction. Working with this will be familiar territory to many and a comfortable amble through the byways of watercolour. While theres nothing excessively taxing (here or in the series in general), you wont feel constrained or short-changed, your creative skills rather being gently stretched; a work-up rather than a work-out, perhaps.
myshelf.com
Search Press groundbreaking Ready To Paint series showed a beginner how to paint pictures with the help of tracings and plenty of staged photographs. But each painting takes some time to complete, and many people are busy (or have rather full walls). This new series contains postcard (6 x 4) sized projects that wont take more than half an hour each and would make excellent greetings cards (or postcards).
When is a book like a donut? When it has a hole in the cover! Look through the hole and you can see the first tracing all ready to transfer to your paper. These smaller pictures are just the thing for a beginner and offer some beautiful, professional-looking results. You can first find out what you need to buy and discover how to handle watercolors. All this is kept simple and to the point; you will learn more as you work through the projects. Each one is accompanied by at least two pages of instructions with photographs including what techniques you learn and a bit about them. Projects take you through the four seasons, there are country scenes, woodlands, trees in various settings including urban and various types of trees. All are paintings of the UK and many are set in and around the authors Derbyshire home. Included too are some of his finished paintings and an extra three larger paintings to tackle at the end with more pages of instructions. I was impressed how much you could get done in half and hour and have a lovely picture at the end. It is a great way of learning to paint and I look forward to seeing further titles in this series. Search Press does it again!
