Book Review: You Can Paint Vibrant Watercolors in Twelve Easy Lessons

This is a helpful beginners book for learning watercolour.

The author and artist is Yuko Nagayama (永山裕子) from Japan. The original edition of this book is もういちど 透明水彩を始めよう。 基本の12のレッスン which was published in 2012. This edition is translated by publisher Harper Design. There are 104 pages.

This book takes a very hands-on approach to teaching watercolours. There are several step by step tutorials to follow along. It even teaches you basic proportional drawing so that you can sketch the outline of the subject before you add watercolours. I find that very useful for beginners with absolutely no knowledge at drawing. There are even tips on sketching.

The tutorials feature good looking examples. Even though the subjects are simple such as fruits or flowers, after Nagayama's watercolour treatment, they look really nice. The instructions are simple to follow, and the colours to use are clearly listed.

Compared to other watercolour books, this is not comprehensive, so it does not teach you effects like splatter or more advanced techniques like wet on wet. What it does well is to get you comfortable at painting simple subjects with watercolour. And you can then build on what you learn for more challenging subjects in the future.

It's a great instructional book for watercolour beginners. The Japanese edition is also very favourably rated on Amazon Japan.

You Can Paint Vibrant Watercolors in Twelve Easy Lessons is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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