Everyday Watercolor Flowers || Jenna Rainey

This very simple guide is an ideal introduction to flower painting. The format is a standard series of steps covering a wide variety of flower types and there are good instructions that go into plenty of detail about the processes involved.

Following the same working method means that, once you’ve got the hang of how the book works, you can concentrate on the results, rather than having to learn the ropes every time and this promotes both confidence and positive results.

The quality of the illustrations isn’t as good as it might be, though. Detail is often obscured and the colours seem rather washed out. Although this is a drawback, the approach throughout is sound and it’s still a very worthwhile book.

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Everyday Watercolor || Jenna Rainey

This is another of those “learn watercolour in 30 days” books. I don’t mean that to sound dismissive, but it’s important to distinguish it from guides that encourage you to look at the mundane and to paint as often as possible so that you have to find subjects wherever you are. It isn’t one of those.

The initial impression is favourable. This is important because any book in this category has to make you feel welcome, encouraged, and that you want to get stuck in. We’re here for a month, not just a one night stand. The lessons are straightforward, short and simple. You may be painting every day, but not all day and, by tea time, you won’t have forgotten what you learnt at breakfast. You’ve got time to practise, absorb and make sure you’re fully up to speed before the alarm clock tomorrow. You won’t even have to take leave of absence from your job; there’s plenty you can do while dinner’s cooking.

All that’s absolutely fine, but where I do have a reservation is that the execution isn’t all that good. Many of the examples seem flat and lacking any real sense of atmosphere, and there are too many cacti. It does mean that you’re not going to be faced with something you feel you can never hope to emulate, but there’s also a sense that you have a teacher who maybe only completed the book themselves last week. You might think that the method outweighs that, though.

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