Paint Pad Poster Book: City Scenes

The Paint Pad Poster Books from Search Press are aimed at beginners and designed to produce fast results. Each book includes five posters to pull out and frame, as well as a watercolour outline and step-by-step instructions so that you can have a go at painting the subject yourself. The books are printed in a large, landscape format, which helps to present each annotated stage clearly, and the instructions are east to remove from the book and pin to your drawing board for reference. This new poster book focuses on city scenes painted by popular artist and tutor, Geoff Kersey, including London, Paris and New York.

The first thing that’ll strike you on opening this is the sheer amount of detail in the source images. These are not simply blow-ups of the ones that appeared in the original books, they’ve been completely re-originated so that colours, marks and even granulation are immediately visible. It’s striking, as it should be.

The five scenes here cover bridges, statues, vegetation and street furniture as well as water, buildings and other structures. The instructions are simple and you should be able to produce results you can be proud to display for only a little over £3 a time.

This is the third entry in Search Press’ innovative series for novice watercolour painters. The large format (A3) book contains five sheets of watercolour paper with outlines printed on them, plus fully illustrated tutorials, and a brief overview. When you have finished you will have learned a lot about working in your chosen medium plus a set of five elegant cityscapes to hang on your walls.

This is a great idea for anybody who is keen to make a start with watercolour painting but is not sure where to begin. It also eliminates the need for buying a pad of suitable paper and an instruction book; just purchase paints and brushes. There is a handy page which shows you a shopping list of everything you will need for each painting, plus a section at the beginning which tells you a bit about each item. Discover how to use masking fluid, what forms the paint comes in and the basic types of brushes as well as how to prepare your paper and what size frames to buy.

To show you what your picture will look like there are exact size pictures of all five paintings which is helpful. Each project is built up in four stages, and for each stage an A5 sized image has arrows leading to captions describing what has been done, plus smaller pictures show details in close-up. This eliminates having to read a lot of text and there is nothing quite as good as an image to show rather than tell.

If you don’t want to use watercolours these pictures can also be completed using pastels, coloured pencils, or acrylics. Thus, the book is also ideal for somebody who wants to try a new medium or who can already paint but wants to try a new subject. The pictures show the Arc de Triomphe, Tower Bridge, a London skyline, Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. I hope that soon there will be more additions to this excellent series.

Geoff Kersey is an experienced watercolourist and is much in demand as a teacher and demonstrator. He lives and works in Derbyshire, where he has a studio, and he exhibits extensively. He has made many watercolour DVDs, contributes to various art publications and has written many bestselling watercolour books.