Book Review: Adventurous Watercolours

The watercolour art shown in the book isn't the usual watercolour style. If there's traditional and non-traditional style, she would belong to very non-traditional. Her style is more towards to the experimental side, especially her techniques.

Jenny Wheatley doesn't claim to be a purist. Her work in watercolour doesn't follow the conventional approach. She often combines watercolour with other media, like gouache or even collage. She even gives her style a name called mark-making which is unnecessary.

There really isn't any particular piece in the book that really catches my eye. Even if it grabs my attention, it's often for the wrong reasons. The collage with paper cutouts don't work well with watercolour. Her glazing has the effect of looking like crayons sometimes. She doesn't follow any particular colour theory when colouring so colours can be a bit chaotic at times. There are no white space in her paintings, not that it's a bad thing, but I'm saying that to emphasis the non-traditional nature of her work.

Much of her art are created on location and from reference, but with her style, they sort of lose the presence of the place.

Even if you want to try out more experimental watercolour techniques, I'll recommend that you should look at the pages before buying the book, or at least check out her website to get an idea of what to expect.

Adventurous Watercolours is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP | CN)

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