Watercolour Landscapes (Trace & Paint) || Terry Harrison & Geoff Kersey

This is another compilation from the successful and valuable Ready to Paint series and is excellent value, with 15 step-by-step projects from four different books. There’s a good variety of material here, from fields and barns to buildings and seascapes, both in the UK and abroad. I have to remark that some of the subjects seem a little tenuous as landscapes – a bicycle parked against a bougainvillea-covered wall is not, in my humble opinion, a landscape – but I also feel rather picky doing it as there’s a wealth of good and varied material here.

The downside to the format is that there are 18 outlines which are fixed into the centre of the book. Tear them out and you land up with a front and a back half with no middle. I think I’d probably cut the remainder in half, but then each of them has a cover missing. There’s no way round it, but it does mean you’re going to have to make mincemeat of the book if you want to use it. Also, the outlines are printed on thin book paper rather than tracing paper, which means that you have to resort to a bit of ingenuity to get the images onto your own surface. Again, it’s not insurmountable, and it helps to keep the price down, but it’s an issue. The publisher does seem to have used thinner paper than some previous forays into the format, though, which helps.

On balance, these smallish niggles don’t outweigh the value of the book, though.

	Trace & Paint Watercolour Landscapes Book with Terry Harrison & Geoff Kersey

Flowers (Trace & Paint) || Wendy Jelbert, Michael Lakin, Fiona Peart, Wendy Tait

This is a bind-up of material that has previously appeared in four of the Ready to Paint series. Apart from the portmanteau price, which is pretty good value, the different here is that, instead of tracings, you get outlines pre-printed on plain paper that are really quite difficult to transfer. If it’s this aspect that you really want, then I’d recommend giving this a miss and shelling out for the original books. However, if you think you can dispense with the outlines, then the executions are very nicely done and you can certainly learn a lot about flower painting – I’ve recommended at least two of these before.

	Trace & Paint Flowers Book with Wendy Jelbert, Michael Lakin, Fiona Peart and Wendy Tait