Book Review: Sketch Club: Urban Watercolour by Phil Dean

Sketch Club: Urban Watercolour is the sequel to Sketch Club: Urban Drawing which was published in 2020 by Ilex Press. This book is a 112-page paperback. The author is Phil Dean, artist and graphic designer based in London.

This book is an introduction to urban sketching with watercolour. This book is packed with a practical tips for beginners who have just started sketching. There are several tutorials, 15 step-by-step tutorials, where Dean talks about the drawing process and it's quite insightful. The watercolour sketches featured are very beautiful and the main reason why I bought this book.

The limitation of this book is it covers the general and overview but there are no specifics on drawing techniques. You'll get more out of this book if you already know how to draw. If you don't know how to draw, you still won't know how to draw after going through the book as there are no drawing exercises that show the specifics of drawing, e.g. getting the angles right, understanding perspective and how they affect form, observation and proportional drawing. I'm not sure if the fundamental drawing techniques are covered in the earlier book Sketch Club: Urban Drawing so I can't say much. But if you want to learn how to draw from observation, I recommend you get Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson instead.

The main downside of this book is half the book is actually on drawing even though there's the word "watercolour" in its title. This book will work better as a companion book to other more hands-on instructional artbooks.

You can see more of Phil Dean's art on his website. And if you like his style of art, do check out sketches by Simone Ridyard too.

If you want to learn more about urban sketching, see these books.

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