A simple but comprehensive guide, offering warm and engaging encouragement for anyone looking to learn how to watercolor.
Simon’s how-to workbook aims to teach the fundamentals of watercolor techniques.
When taking up a new hobby, it’s often hard to know where to start or what to buy. In this introductory workbook, learning to paint with watercolors is laid out in a simple, easy-to-follow plan. The suggested materials list is simple without being too basic, with Simon noting to the reader: “I want you to see how much beauty you can create with minimal supplies and expense.” She recommends just two student-grade brushes, a waterproof-ink pen, and nine suggested paint colors, only one of which she recommends buying at professional quality. The text notes that the project pages are printed on premium watercolor paper, meant to be painted upon directly. (A digital copy of the book was provided for review.) Before starting each exercise, the author explains methods clearly, including specific water-to-paint ratios, color “recipes” to create various shades, including a comprehensive guide for human skin tones, and, of course, various painting techniques, such as wet-in-wet, wet-on-dry, dry brushing, and more. To perfect these new skills, there are more than two dozen line drawings of plants and animals. For each, Simon indicates suggested colors and brushes at the top of the page alongside a completed full-color version of the painting. The painting process is meticulously described in anywhere from five to nine stages, with specific techniques helpfully made more prominent by using all-caps: “With your Round 4 brush, WASH an entire tulip flower (or just a few choice petals!) in a clear wash, leaving RESERVED areas on some petals, as well as the flower centers.” Simon’s voice is affable and supportive, giving the book the feeling of spending time with a talented friend. Her assurance that one can get beautiful results using easy-to-find materials is sure to be appreciated by newcomers to the craft.
A simple but comprehensive guide, offering warm and engaging encouragement for anyone looking to learn how to watercolor.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 9781950968268
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Paige Tate & Co
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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