Urban Watercolor Sketching, Felix Scheinberger - Book Review

This is a weird book.  I went into it open-eyed, already aware that, despite its name, this wasn’t a book on urban sketching.  I mean, you only need to flick through it to see that it's full of these weird caricature-like drawings of people with huge lips, button noses and exaggerated postures.  And they're not really painted either.  Lots of the drawings are just left unpainted and those bits that are painted aren’t painted accurately, with paint inside and outside the edges of the shapes - no colouring in here.  And the colours are adventurous - who needs flesh tones when you can paint half off a face blue or red and leave the rest white?

These drawings look great and I was looking forward to reading about them in a book called Urban Watercolor Sketching.  Unfortunately I discovered that there wasn’t very much in there about this drawing/painting style and that most of the book was about general watercolour painting.  There were a few interesting tips towards the end but not as many as I'd have hoped for.  And a lot of the text wasn’t really worth reading, either talking about where colours come from and how paper is made or just making encouraging noises about how a painting is about what the artist sees and how if someone else can't see it that's because the moment has passed.

So we have a book with a title, pictures and text that form a weird, inconsistent threesome.  If anything, the two of the three that are closest together are the text and the title and, with a different set of drawings in the book, it might have all hung together.  I wouldn’t have liked it though - I'd still have been marking it down for being a bit light on content.

Anyway, I'm giving this book two stars.  The illustrations are its one redeeming feature.  I enjoyed looking through them and it's inspired me to have a go at something different: a looser approach to drawing and a very loose approach to colouring the drawing in using watercolour.

But, yeah, weird, weird book and I'm not sure I'd buy it again.  Paperback, 156 pages, two palettes.

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