Everyday Watercolor: Learn to Paint Watercolor in 30 Days Spiral-bound – October 10, 2017

Good book, author is very good at explaining her techniques and is a nice companion to her online course. If you are new to watercolor this is a helpful resource to learn certain strokes but found some of her brush strokes to be a bit tight and controlled. I just like more of a loose approach and not a fan of layering. Overall, a good choice because she covers a variety of topics.

Great book if you are a self learner or cannot find a local water color class. The companion online class reinforces everything in the book series. This is so valuable, I bought the kindle version, too, and refer to it or one of Rainey’s other three books every day.

Not only is Jenna a talented artist, she is a talented teacher. This combination makes this workbook easy and fun to work through!

Jenna Rainey has created a beautiful book with 30 lessons to be done in 30 days supposedly aimed at beginners. I am a true beginner, with only minor art experience. The lessons become increasingly complex and require more drawing expertise than I expected. Reading the text to complete each lesson requires a lot of concentration, patience, and re-reading. Here are my pluses and minuses. I am learning a lot and getting a lot of gratification from finished pieces from each lesson, but I also have many frustrations and have had to seek out other resources to fill in the blanks. I decided to move on to another teacher, stopping at Day 23. Only 1 of the remaining 7 lessons teaches something new. The rest have complex, time-consuming drawings with many layers that need to dry. They felt like busy work to me.Pros:The book is beautifully laid out with good instructions and great illustrations.The book teaches many of the basic techniques.She does a fairly decent job of breaking down the tasks to complete each painting.I really like having a lesson to do every day and the way that the skills build on each other.Cons:The author does not give enough information about how to mix colors. Sometimes she will simply say to mix up the following color pallette without saying how much of one color to use or what kind of ratio of water with paint. She is often asking a newbie to complete a very complex task without much guidance.She does not tell you enough about the color names she is using.The author has a rather "feminine" style of mostly plants and flowers and her color preferences also feminine with pinks and pastels.I had to search for other peoples' videos to learn how much water to put on my brush and how much water to mix with my paints.When the author wrote this book, she was using one brand of paints (Windsor Newton), but in the last year or two, she has changed to a different brand with which she obviously has some kind of financial deal. This means that her videos on making a color wheel and using colors will be useless if, like me, you took her advice from the book and bought Windsor Newton paints.In the beginning of the book she has you make a light to dark value swatch. This is way beyond the skill level of somebody who has never used watercolors before. I was really annoyed at this instruction at this early point. It seems to me that she should have beta tested her lessons on true beginners.In conclusion, I am enjoying the book, learning a lot from it, but it can be frustrating and is not sufficient as my only resource to learn basic watercolor strategies and skills.

Very informative book.

What a wonderful idea. Easy directions. Beautiful quality book.

Jenna is a great teacher with easy to follow lessons. Unlike other books I was able to recreate most of the lessons.

I bought this book in April 2022 after finding the author on YouTube. I not only wanted to learn watercolor, but I also wanted to become proficient in creating water color paintings. I made it through only a few of the lessons before becoming frustrated.In March of 2023, I started the book over again because I was (and still am) determined to become a watercolor painter. And once again, I made it through only a few of the lessons, but this time I understood why. It's not the book for me, or in my opinion, the book for someone who wants to see definitive progress to the goal of becoming proficient in creating water color paintings.It's a book that's designed for playing with watercolor as it's not organized in a way with explicit information that will help you easily accomplish the exercises on your own. There's no indication in any of the chapters as to what you're going to accomplish or an overview of the exercise so that you know how many steps you'll need to take, in what order, and how quickly.Her examples of the exercises are good, but she doesn't explain how to go about recreating them, how long you can expect it to take, or how to create a nice looking composition. All she tells you is that she starts at the top left corner.If you're just looking to see what working with watercolor is like, and just have some fun, then this is a book that can help you do that.