Paint Pad Poster Book – City Scenes

The first thing that’ll strike you on opening this is the sheer amount of detail in the source images. These are not simply blow-ups of the ones that appeared in the original books (I noted features of the series when I wrote about the first volume), they’ve been completely re-originated so that colours, marks and even granulation are immediately visible. It’s striking, as it should be.

The five scenes here cover bridges, statues, vegetation and street furniture as well as water, buildings and other structures. The instructions are simple and you should be able to produce results you can be proud to display for only a little over £3 a time.

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Paint Pad Poster Book – Flowers

Search Press have supersized their Paint Pad series. Not so much a triple-stack cheeseburger with a quart of fizzy sugar as the full 48 ounce free-if-you-can-finish-it T-bone. These are BIG.

Interestingly, there is no author credit and I think I recognise the images from other books. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the format, though. An A3 book is not easy to manage so, instead of the portfolio styling of the parent series, these are pads where you’re clearly intended to pull out not just the sheets of watercolour paper with their pre-printed outlines, but the instruction pages as well. Tape the paper down onto a drawing board, pin the instructions on the wall and it all starts to make sense. This isn’t mentioned in the How To Use This Book introduction, but it’s the obvious solution.

The content has also been pared down severely in the light of this not being something to sit down and read. There’s no list of materials or introduction to techniques, although there is a “what you’ll need” list for each section. The whole thing is about the image and completing it. Once you’ve painted the five exercises, the rest of the book is basically disposable. That sounds likes sacrilege for something costing a whisker under sixteen pounds, but your return is the five full-size paintings you can frame and hang on the wall.

The quality is stunning. Each painting is shown in its complete state and, at this size, any shortcomings in the reproduction are going to be immediately obvious and a massive frustration. Full use has been made of the large page size to lay the instructions out clearly and illustrate them in detail. Everything is really clear and, if you’re adopting my suggestion of pinning them on a wall, easy to see.

This is quite a departure and a lot more than just a vary-it-a-bit exercise to generate extra sales. There’s an elegant simplicity to it that’ll make serious art easily accessible to even the raw beginner.

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