Book Review: 5-Minute Watercolor: Super-quick Techniques for Amazing Watercolor Painting

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5-minute Watercolor is the fifth book in the 5-minute art series. The earlier books covered subject matter, this book covers a medium, watercolour. The artist and author is Samantha Nielsen (Instagram).

Just like other books in the series, this book is for beginners and it works better as a complementary book rather than one you would get to learn the medium comprehensively.

The book talks about tools, techniques, subject matter you can paint and taking it further with more experimentation.

Every two pages features a topic and each is split into five quick easily digestible tips/techniques. Because of the format, limited number of pictures can be used. For example, when explaining the different types of watercolour paper, eg coldpress, hotpress and rough, it's just a text description. This applies to the mentioned techniques but the pictures show the result and not the actual process. It relies on you to experiment and try out the techniques described. It would be more helpful to have more photos showing the process, or whatever that's talked about so that there's at least something to compare to, or work towards. Minor quibble.

Since this book is just a collection of short tips, there aren't any full length tutorial that shows you how all the techniques would work together to produce a painting. Having said that, there's a long list of fun tips and techniques for you to try. Some of the techniques involve splatter, using tape, wet on wet, dry brush, masking fluid, lifting paint and more.

If you're an absolute beginner, I would suggest picking up some other book. If you already know some watercolour techniques, you can explore and incorporate the additional tips features in this book to mix up your style a bit.

5-Minute Watercolor: Super-quick Techniques for Amazing Watercolor Painting is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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There's another edition published by Search Press. Content is the same but cover art is different.

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn

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